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New York State Education Department 
ADDRESSES BY THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION 

CONTENTS 

The Demands upon the Schools 3 

AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE RHODE ISLAND INSTITUTE OF INSTRUCTION, AT 
PROVIDENCE, R. I, ON OCT. 20, IQ04 

Claims of the Educational System upon the Colleges 18 

REMARKS AT A CONFERENCE OF UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE PRESIDENTS 
HELD AT THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, ALBANY, N. Y. ON NOV. l8, 
I904 

The Supervision of the Country Schools 22 

AN ADDRESS AT THE FIFTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF NEW YORK STATE 
SCHOOL COMMISSIONERS AND SUPERINTENDENTS AT SYRACUSE, N. Y. 
ON NOV. 21, IOX>4 

Physical Training and Athletics in the Schools 36 

AN ADDRESS AT THE SIXTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MASSACHU- 
SETTS TEACHERS ASSOCIATION AT BOSTON, MASS. ON NOV. 25, I904 

The New York Secondary School System 54 

AN ADDRESS AT THE JOINT MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATED ACADEMIC 
PRINCIPALS, THE COUNCIL OF GRAMMAR SCHOOL PRINCIPALS, THE 
SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, THE TRAINING TEACHERS CONFER- 
ENCE, AND THE DRAWING TEACHERS CLUB AT SYRACUSE, N. Y. ON 
DEC. 28, 1904 



D^69m-N,»-4ooo 



V 



ALBANY 

NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 
I904 



STATE OF NEW YORK 

EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Regents of the University 
With years when terms expire 

1913 Whitelaw Reid M.A. LL.D. Chancellor ... New York 

1906 St Clair McKelway M.A. L.H.D. LL.D. D.C.L. 

Vice Chancellor Brooklyn 

1908 Daniel Beach Ph.D. LL.D Watkins 

1914 Pliny T. Sexton LL.D Palmyra 

1912 T. Guilford Smith M.A. C.E. LL.D Buffalo 

1905 Albert Vander Veer M.A. Ph.D. M.D. LL.D. . Albany 

1907 William Nottingham M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. . . Syracuse 

1910 Charles A. Gardiner Ph.D. L.H.D. LL.D. D.C.L. New York 

1915 Charles S. Francis B.S Troy 

1911 Edward Lauterbach M.A New York 

1909 Eugene A. Philbin LL.B. LL.D New York 

Commissioner of Education 
ANDREW S. DRAPER LL.D. 

Assistant Commissioners 

Howard J. Rogers M.A. LL.D. First Assistant Commissioner 
Edward J. Goodwin Lit.D. Second Assistant Commissioner 
Augustus S. Downing M.A. Third Assistant Commissioner 

Secretary to the Commissioner 

Harlan H. Horner B.A. 

Director of Libraries and Home Education 

Melvil Dewey LL.D. 

Director of Science and State Museum 

John M. Clarke LL.D. JUN 3 

Chiefs of Divisions 

Accounts, William Mason 
Attendance, James D. Sullivan 
Examinations, Charles F. Wheelock B.S. 
Inspections, Frank H. Wood M.A. 
Law, Thomas E. Finegan M.A. 
Records, Charles E. Fitch L.H.D. 
Statistics, Hiram C. Case 



a6 

i 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 

^j AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE RHODE ISLAND INSTITUTE OF INSTRUCTION, 
AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., ON OCT. 20, I9O4 

Mr President and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Rhode Island 
Institute of Instruction: After a lapse of fifteen years, I am glad 
to come back for another address to the Rhode Island teachers. 
Of course the first thing- a stranger thinks about when coming 
into Rhode Island is her size. She is little and mighty ; not big, 
but great. She has the typical yankee stature; she takes small 
room upon the ground, but she is as tall as any of her sisters. 
Her history goes back to the beginning of the nation and it is as 
invigorating and as full of heroism as that of any of the other states. 
Her industries are so noteworthy that her bank accounts, man 
for man, lead all the rest. It should be woman for woman also. 
An old university, never more potential and honored than now, 
throws its lights from the brow of her intellectual hills, and her 
schools, and unnumbered instruments of culture outside of the 
schools, give her educational eminence to be envied. I have 
known some of her school men long and pleasantly and am glad 
to strike hands with them once again. All this, and more, is in 
my mind as I rise to speak to this radiant company of Rhode 
Island teachers. For the pleasure I find in all the circumstances 
and in your greetings, I give you my most sincere acknowledg- 
ments. 

Because I hear much about them, and because I should like 
, to know better how to meet them, I have set as my theme, 
The Demands Upon the Schools 

This is a very free country. Above all the constitutional 
nations we have a maximum of freedom and a minimum of 
restraint. We are likely to learn that we must have more 
restraint in order to keep so much freedom, and when convinced 
of it we will act upon the knowledge. But the added restraint 
will never be made to run against harmless talk. It will be 
against acts rather than speech, against violence rather than 
foolishness, against dangers rather than demands. In other 
constitutional governments a subject may talk too freely about 
the monarch or a course of the ministry at his peril, but it will 




4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

never be so of an American citizen and any policy of his state. 
If Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson did not settle that 
question while they lived, their constancy and their courage con- 
tained the fertile germs which in this soil soon settled it for all 
time to come. And men and women, — particularly women, of 
course, may be cheerful over the confidence that for a time suf- 
ficiently long to make any solicitude of ours superfluous, there 
is not likely to be any diminution of the precious freedom of talk. 

This privilege is not to be regarded lightly. It is a beneficent 
freedom. It makes us a very aggressive and a very progressive 
country. The common talk often starts without thought, but 
discussion produces thought. There is intellectual pleasure and 
quickening in it all. No one hesitates about proposing or 
demanding something because that something is new. Antici- 
pation waits upon the surprising and progress gains ground 
through the unexpected. Out of it all we have become proverb- 
ially good-natured and considerate of one another. We do not 
take all propositions as seriously as our fathers did. If we get 
material advantage out of the propositions made and the things 
done which come to something, so we get our proverbial good- 
nature out of all the discussion and out of the things done which 
come to grief; and that is national progress too. This is not 
saying that we take really important things less seriously than 
our fathers did. Upon the really serious concerns of individual 
and of social living, the popular thought is no less set and the 
common emotions no less true than in the days of the men and 
women whose virtues we admire and whose history we inherit 
and extol. On the whole things have gone very well. It would 
be weak to believe that on all points we are ahead of all other 
peoples, but we are likely to have enough points to the good to 
make us reasonably safe if any unregenerate should have the 
hardihood to draw any very exact international comparisons. 

All this is abundantly illustrated by the propositions arising 
in the schools and the demands that are made upon them. The 
educational system is omnipresent, and it is largely owned and 
managed by the public. It is open to popular criticism and very 
subject to popular demands. Because its teaching force is so 
lacking in definite legal standing, and therefore also in perma- 
nency and professional independence, and because the trustees 
and directors set by the people to manage it are so frequently 
changed, and therefore so professionally inexperienced, the sys- 
*^m is especially open to demands and particularly sensitive to 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 5 

criticism. And it must be said, also, that the people in the 
schools more than keep up with the people outside in advancing 
fertile and prolific propositions, and in trying experiments of 
their own. Too much resistance might be worse than too much 
responsiveness, but there are a great many people — in the schools 
and out— who would willingly dare the peril that would make 
them sure whether it is or not. 

Let us hear some of the people who come in quick succession 
to the desk of an officer charged with the responsibility of gen- 
eral administration in the schools. 

Here is a matron who urges that domestic science, by which 
she means cooking, sewing, millinery, etc., be taught. 

Here is the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic 
to arrange for more work which will stir patriotism. 

Here is a man who has learned how to modulate the voice 
and breathe properly, who wants to instruct all the teachers in 
his specialty. 

Here is the superintendent of farmers institutes who insists 
that all the schools should teach agriculture. 

Here is a committee of a mothers congress, who have been 
appointed to arrange for more motherly management of the teachers 
and by their committee. 

Here is the agent who claims that the schools can not afford 
and should not dare to go longer without the books of his house. 

Here is a merchant who tells us that when boys get through 
school they are worthless in business, and that we are bound to 
make them good for something to tradesmen. 

Here is one who wants more Latin, and next to him are two 
others who want more practical work and less Latin. 

Here is one charged with the responsibility of getting a teacher 
appointed, who suggests that he represents some organization 
which he intimates should be placated. 

Here is a man who wants military drill in the schools because 
he thinks it makes boys manly, and elbowing him is another who 
is opposed to it because, as he insists, it breeds the spirit of 
conquest. 

Here is one who wants a dentist employed by the public to 
look after the children's teeth ; and he has with him a friend who 
wants the schools to supply a training in Spanish so as to fit the 
youngsters to manage our new possessions. 

Here is another who wants warm lunches, swimming pools, 
etc. in the schools, so that children may not be kept from learn- 



6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

ing because of hunger and so that they may learn the virtue of 
cleanliness. 

Here is a mother who wants the principal of the high school 
disciplined because he insisted, when her son, a pupil, started a 
newspaper bearing the name of the school and purporting to 
represent it, that the boy and the paper should be amenable to 
the discipline of the school. 

Here is one who with little disguise would have some schools 
better suited to the rich than to the poor, and others better 
adapted to the poor than to the rich; and here is another who 
would have the schools see to it that one boy is especially pre- 
pared for college and another specially trained to go to work. 

Here, in quick succession, are several gentlemen who are warm 
about certain political, social and scientific theories which they 
think are vital to the people and should be exploited in the 
schools. 

Here is one who wants the schools to train professional or 
mechanical specialists to the end that when the pupils leave the 
schools they may be at once capable of earning a competency. 

Here is a mild looking man who demands that the schools shall 
lose no time in aiding the faithful to reform the spelling, and 
he leaves no doubt of the fact that he would die for the cause. 

Here is a physiological psychologist who would pretty nearly 
have us measure and weigh and count the eyebrows of all the 
children every day from their twelfth to their sixteenth year, in 
order to sustain psychological contentions concerning physiology 
which the professors of physiology deny. 

Here is a newspaper demanding radical changes in the schools, 
not so much because the editor is overwhelmed by his responsi- 
bility to the schools as because from his expert newspaper 
instinct, he knows that everybody is interested in the schools. 

Here is one who urges that what all the teachers need is pro- 
fessional training or wide reading in educational history and 
philosophy with plenty of methods of teaching, and here is 
another who insists with no less emphasis that before one can 
become much of a teacher he must not only read but masticate 
a good deal besides educational theory, and that methods do not 
count for much before their minds are filled with material for 
ready use. 

Here is one who declares that it is the business of the schools 
to make men of character rather than men of learning, that 
character *s based upon religion, and that the schools are God- 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 7 

less and not acceptable because the Bible is not read; and here 
is another who insists that the Bible shall not be read because 
the teacher does not understand it correctly, or will not read it 
according to the lights of a particular church. 

Here is one who demands that all examinations as a basis of 
promotion be abolished, and another that all flagellations, as the 
dernier ressort in the interest of behavior, be likewise perma- 
nently stayed. 

Here is one who wants to do something in the schools in order 
to prove that she is really of some use in the world, and claims 
any sort of an annex which will attract attention and enable her 
to do it, and here is another who would have schools which are 
maintained at common cost so poorly sustained as to help none 
but the very poor who can afford no better. 

This enumeration might easily go much further, but the list 
is already much longer than need be for the purpose of illustra- 
tion. Who is to meet, and how are we to meet, all of these 
demands? I can not answer specifically, but I propose to dis- 
cuss some subjects having a general bearing upon them. 

PUBLIC OPINION 

There must be no mistaking the fact that the schools are the 
people's schools, and that their development must be upon lines 
which decisive public sentiment lays down. We may well try to 
enlighten and influence public opinion, but whatever course it 
takes we need not fear it. Our free flowing democratic opinions, 
resulting from our full discussions, assured in our constitutions, 
aided by the abundance of our legislation, and expressed in the 
frequent changes in our law, have developed, and will continue 
to develop, institutions as positive, as substantial and as benefi- 
cent as they are characteristic and unique. This it is that dis- 
tinguishes our status from that of the constitutional governments 
of the Old World. They have had the chance to get as much 
out of parliamentary debates, and out of the English, French, 
Dutch and German revolutions, as we have. But they have not 
had the intermixing and the continuous shaking-up that we have 
had ; they have not had their blood warmed and their minds 
quickened by other factors of population, as ours have been, and 
so they have not had the chance or been able to make the most 
of a chance, as we have done. To the free growth and the aggres- 
sive self-assertiveness of our public opinion we owe our marked 
characteristics and our distinguishing institutions. For this we 
may well be grateful. We need not be afraid of it. We may well 



NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

bear our share in making it. But when we discern it, we shall 
do well if we fall in with it. 

And this principle is to be observed negatively as well as posi- 
tively. If we are to fall in with the things which popular senti- 
ment demands, we are likewise bound to refrain from the things 
which popular sentiment will not support. We are not to take 
steps of questionable wisdom until directed by competent and 
responsible authority. Such authority is justified in resenting 
acts completed which it does not approve and has not been per- 
mitted to consider. And, moreover, we are not to mistake a 
swallow for a summer, — we are not to take an assurance or a 
demand as a positive indication of public opinion. 

SCHOOL BOARDS 

It is not well to assume that the management of the people's 
schools by the people's boards is a vicious factor in the educa- 
tional plan. It is true that it takes a man who becomes a mem- 
ber of a school board without any recent knowledge of accepted 
educational theory and practice, a good while to come into work- 
able relations with the prevailing order of things, and it often 
happens that by the time he has come up to the maximum of his 
efficiency he has to make way for another, and that in conse- 
quence the board and the system are in a constant state of agi- 
tation and uncertainty. It is also true that forceful men who 
become members of school boards often go farther than is well 
in disrupting situations rather than in mending them, and some- 
times put personal marks upon school systems, which might 
much better have been omitted. It is even true, though happily 
not very often, that a vicious man gets into a school board and 
sells out a sacred trust for the grossest gain. These things must 
be counted among the disadvantages inseparably associated with 
self-government. Still, there are more advantages than disad- 
vantages. 

The vicious men in school boards are very few in number. 
They make a bad mess of it while they are there and they deserve 
more drastic punishment than they get, but there are hardly 
enough of them to be in the reckoning. There are a good many 
ambitious men who come into school boards with thoughts of 
saying something and doing something. Betimes they say some- 
thing and do something which plows into educational theory and 
practice or stirs up settled conditions. But let us be thankful 
for ambitious men. Let us remember that educational theory 
which can not stand the rub ought to be stirred up, and that there 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 9 

are a great many settled educational situations which need abra- 
sion by vigorous men. Ninety-five per cent of all members of 
school boards feel their responsibility, are proud to be associ- 
ated with the schools, and anxious to do what they can for their 
betterment. Let us help them and he helped by them. Let us 
get their point of view and give them purs, without conceit and 
without obsequiousness, with knowledge of the fact that it is as 
important that the schools shall be impressed with the common 
thought and the popular feeling which these men must be 
assumed to represent, as that they shall aim to become the rigid 
and exact exponents of pedagogical theory in that far-away day 
when the men and women of the schools may unite upon a code 
of educational practice which is broad enough and seaworthy 
enough to invite the confidence of the world's people. 

I would emphasize the fact that much of the special strength 
and glory of our schools comes to them through that popular 
administration which is often so troublesome and obnoxious to 
the teachers. Because the schools can not be subjected to any 
manner of exclusiveness — whether of government, of set or sect, 
of a system of philosophical thinking, or yet of fixed devices and 
methods of teaching — but are in the nature of things bound to 
be flexibly adaptable to the needs and reasonably expressive of 
the sense of a people, they are filled with that virile power which 
gives them conspicuous place in the educational work of the 
world. It is the gradual evolution of plans and policies through 
the association of popular administration with teaching experi- 
ence and philosophical thinking which is giving us an educational 
system which is not being imposed upon the people but which is 
theirs, has been made by them and is cherished by them, and which 
is binding a wonderfully dissimilar people into a homogeneous 
nation, and training that nation for a very great mission in the 
world. 

FUNDAMENTALS OF THE SCHOOL SYSTEM 

There are some things about the common school system which 
are so well settled in the constitutions and laws, or in common 
thought and general usage, that there is small occasion to defend 
them. That there shall be within reach of every home a free, 
elementary school, supported by general taxation, the manage- 
ment of which is largely local, but subject to state legislation, 
which shall be wholly free from whatever might count for or 
against any political, religious, social, commercial or other inter- 
est with which only a part of the people may sympathize, is 



10 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

fundamental. So it is that a community desiring to maintain a 
free secondary school has legal competency to do so. In more 
than half of the states, colleges and great universities have been 
established on the same free footing, but under direct state sup- 
port and management. 

There is a truly considerable and wholly respectable number 
who object to this entire fundamental plan, on the radical ground 
that the work of the churcn and the work of the school should 
go together. It is a conviction with them, and the sincerity of 
it is not lacking. The common school system has grown out. 
of the very genius of our plan of government, and is held by 
the overwhelming majority to be vital to the oneness and there- 
fore to the life of the nation. Dissent from this long and widely 
accepted view may be regretted, but when the dissent is based 
upon religious grounds, the people who advance it must be 
respected. The fact of it is not sufficient to justify continuous 
ill will or rasping words over the matter. The objection runs 
against the plan and spirit of the public school system, rather 
than against those who are in charge of that system. If there 
is much desire in any quarter to have a fresh determination of 
the subject, that fact may be regretted in the interest of national 
comity and religious brotherhood, but the right to have it could 
hardly be denied. In that event, — and this is why I speak of it 
at all, it is a matter for the people to act upon through the ordi- 
nary channels of public opinion, through elections, through the 
representative assemblies, through the courts that determine the 
law, and the officers who execute it. It is not a matter of school 
administration. We have no discretion about the fundamentals 
of the school system. We are to observe them. Certainly we do 
not rest our interest in the schools wholly on the ground of 
employment. We believe in the plan and we breathe the spirit 
of the system, and it is our right to be entirely free in our belief 
and in our expression of it ; but it is too much to assume that 
the responsibility for defending the groundwork of the public 
schools is upon us. If we make schools which meet the needs 
and assure the rights of all, we shall meet the task which is set 
for us. If the necessity arises, the mighty people who are behind 
us may be trusted to make satisfactory deliverances upon national 
educational theories and policies. 

UNITY OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 

We are bound to abstain from all that may unnecessarily pre- 
vent, as much as we are bound to aid whatever will promote, 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS II 

cooperative efficiency among all the educational instrumentalities 
of the country. Whenever a private establishment claims to be 
a school, unless there are earmarks of deceit and fraud, it is 
entitled to fraternal regard and sympathy. It is not to be much 
meddled with by new laws or by public officers unless conditions 
make investigations necessary for the public protection. It 
seems bound to make known the facts concerning the attendance 
and the kind of instruction it is giving because the withholding 
of such information can serve no good purpose if the institution 
is all right, and the having of it is needful to the making and the 
execution of the necessary plans of the state, as well as to the 
strengthening of the bonds which ought to exist between all 
beneficent undertakings. If it seeks recognition for its work in 
the plans of the state or asks any public commendation or certifi- 
cation of what it is doing, it is bound to submit to such inspection 
as must be the necessary basis of public action. While it can 
not share in public support without being regulated by public 
law and subjected to public management, the thought of our 
people and particularly the spirit of our work should save it 
from being annoyed by officials, and give it a natural right to 
participate in the common sympathy and encouragement of all 
who hold citizenship in the democracy of learning. 

If it is well that the public and private schools shall stand in 
agreeable relations to each other, it has become educationally 
necessary that the upper, the middle and the lower schools shall 
understand and sustain one another. Their work is interlacing. 
More youth are going to college ; still more want to go ; and 
the more to go the better. The road must be an open, a con- 
tinuous and a smooth one. But it is not to be fenced so that 
none, can turn aside from it. The work of the elementary schools 
is not to be shaped with special reference to preparing pupils for 
college, because more than 95% of all the pupils of the elementary 
schools never go beyond them. What the American school sys- 
tem needs is to unload some 01 the specialties which the enthusi- 
asts have induced the managers to take on, and then to follow a 
simple and balanced policy, with opportunities which best meet 
the needs of all and with special advantages to none. If a com- 
munity is wealthy and strong and willing to elaborate those 
opportunities, well and good ; if a state will carry them to the 
very point of complete preparation for professional or industrial 
leadership, well and good, with added emphasis ; but, regardless 
of this, an American state falls short of a high duty if it does 



12 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

not assure to every boy and girl within its borders that exact 
training in the rudiments which is the foundation of all the rest 
and the guaranty of opportunity in the world. To do this, while 
we encourage all who will go to the very hights of learning, the 
unity and solidarity of the educational system is vital. 

The educational system is growing in unity. It is growing 
slowly, but perhaps as rapidly as conditions will permit. Any 
real progress must be made by the college and university people, 
and while they are generally willing they are generally weighted 
with a sort of refined clumsiness which is hindering. Many of 
them have never been in, and have not the spirit or the viewpoint 
of, the common schools, and their specialized work tends to carry 
them farther from the common outlook; and when they do try 
to show the good will which they have, the result is often that 
of a watchmaker trying to train a farmer's boy in horsemanship. 

There is no disguising it that the West is further along than 
the East in this matter of intergrade educational effectiveness. 
They mix better and help one another more. For example, — they 
make less point of exact admission requirements to college. They 
hold that the real test is the ability to do the college work, rather 
than the passing of examinations set by one with no knowledge 
of the character and experience of the candidate. Their demo- 
cratic spirit leads them to give every one with substantial promise 
or reasonable claim, his chance. If he can not make it the trouble 
is his own and no harm is done. His school becomes more care- 
ful about recommending others like him. Of course it will be 
said that this means a low grade of college work, but it does not. 
The work in western universities is no less severe than in eastern. 
It is traditional in the West that one admitted to an eastern 
university never fails to get through. That is far from the case 
in the West. Again, there is a sharper sympathy with the lower 
schools by the college men, who realize that you can not shorten 
the school life of 99 youngsters in order that one may have enough 
time for his professional training to make sure that he will get 
ready for business before he dies ; and that the lower schools 
are not to be shuffled in the splendid game of university pre- 
eminence. As such things as these are more fully realized, there 
will be more coherency and defmiteness of procedure in the 
educational system, and the legitimate demands upon the schools 
will be more completely and easily met, or more justly and 
effectually resisted. 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 13 

DISCRIMINATION 

There must be more resistive power in the school system; 
more discrimination in what the schools shall do. When a feature 
is in itself a good one, it is not very difficult for an enthusiast to 
get a school board or a legislature to add it to the course, Yet 
the assumption of it may be a positive public mistake, Many a 
thing is excellent when carried on by private enterprise or by organi- 
zations moved by benevolent impulses, but vicious when it enters 
into the policy of the state. There is a wide difference in the out- 
come between doing a thing voluntarily, and compelling all the 
people to do it, as we do when the schools take it up. It is not 
saying that the state is not to encourage all sound intellectual and 
moral activities, to say that it is bad to pursue a course which leads 
the people to depend upon the state when they ought to depend 
upon themselves; to count upon the money of the state when they 
ought to count upon money of their own. The schools are not 
asylums. Popular education is free and is not to smack of charity. 
If the conditions of life are specially hard in some places, they must 
be met by private or public charity. The schools are not organized 
for that and ought not to be charged with it. The common schools 
can not go much into the accomplishments. Interest in the good 
and the true and the beautiful is to be nourished through an artistic 
and a hygienic building, with attractive yards about it and the 
masterpieces of art within it; by teachers who are models for 
youth, and by teaching which is exact, gentle, firm and true. The 
place for experimentalism is in the laboratories of the universities 
and not in the classrooms of the lower schools. And there are 
some things which may better be discussed among men, or among 
women, or in the medical colleges, or in the scientific associations, 
than in miscellaneous assemblies of teachers. 

We probably all agree that the work of the schools should lead 
toward doing things as well as toward knowing things. But, unmis- 
takably, there is a waste of time over novelties. We are discov- 
ering unknown faculties and remote possibilities, and when we think 
we have got one we urge a docile board to put in a new course to 
help us train it or catch it, when well known things or established 
plans need our attention completely. We can not arrange the 
schools for every child or every faculty. We are to make the 
schools for all; we are to adjust the children to the schools; and 
we are to inspire them to help themselves. 



14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

MORE CAUTION AND MORE CONFIDENCE 

It is difficult to withhold support from any proposition which 
may seem to add a feature to the public undertakings, when that 
feature is likely to gratify a factor of our population. It is more 
difficult still to oppose movements from within the schools when 
they are advanced with the most genuine and sincere purposes, even 
though they can not be accepted upon any recognized theory of 
sound public policy or of true educational progress. Yet we may well 
believe that this must be done more decisively if the educational 
system is to have and to hold that measure of public confidence 
which is necessary to its best usefulness. 

As I view it, the common thought of this nation is that every 
state, in the exercise of the sovereign authority which it possesses 
over educational matters, is not only bound to assure to every child 
his opportunity, but also to see that he has it even though he be 
unfortunate in his parentage and in his circumstances. This assur- 
ance is to be made good through such aid or such directions to poor 
or dilatory communities as conditions may make necessary. This 
much being assured, all communities are empowered to go as far 
as their means and their spirit will suggest in elaborating the 
schools or multiplying the agencies of general culture. No valid 
objection can be made to public secondary schools wherever the 
proximity of population will support them, and accordingly in every 
considerable town the high school is as much a part of the free 
school system as the elementary school. And it will be surprising 
if in time the older states do not follow the newer ones in pro- 
viding college and university training without charge to such of 
their youth as are prepared for it and will come and take it. In 
the large cities, where it may easily be done, the work of the sec- 
ondary schools has been, or will be, somewhat separated and dis- 
tinguished with a view to better serving the different circumstances 
or intentions of students, and the states have, or will, set up indus- 
trial, scientific and professional, as well as literary colleges, unless 
private endowments and long labor have already developed a suf- 
ficient supply that are good enough and free enough to make such 
a course by the state unnecessary. This is not charity and is not 
looked upon as paternalistic or socialistic in this country. It 
accords with the spirit and is a part of the purpose of the nation. 
It is not saying that we are to shut out of the schools the progress 
and the information of our generation, when we say that there shall 
not be ignorance or confusion about the exact and exacting drudgery 
and methods which have been necessary to train self-conscious power 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 1 5 

into minds in all generations gone and which will be necessary in 
all generations to' come. The sense of the nation, if I mistake not, 
turns against a complexity of work in the lower schools which has 
come from the inborn American tendency to experiment and mul- 
tiply, from the urgency of ambitious superintendents, from the 
desire to please some professional or industrial interest in the com- 
munity, from the influence of some political theory, or from the 
insistence of teachers of special subjects in the schools above, until 
the aggregate has become more conducive to intellectual amuse- 
ment than to mental discipline and the power of discriminating outlook. 
If we would be more cautious about all this — more conservative 
about things which have not been proved, more decisive about with- 
standing demands which are not general, or, better still, if we 
would go much farther and simplify the program of the schools 
by cutting out the things which may be easily learned in a quarter 
of the time later, — if there is ever any occasion to learn them, or the 
things preparatory to the schools above which are so poorly done 
that they have to be thoroughly unlearned before a fair start can 
be made in the advanced schools, we might hope to bring the work 
of the schools within the possibilities of popular comprehension 
and sympathy, and thus to win enlarged public confidence and added 
freedom in administration, which would mean very much to the 
educational system and to the nation. 

EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM 

The school system needs freedom. The organizing and the teach- 
ing must be free or it will be almost futile. If it has to be done 
under influences which control without understanding it, or through 
agencies which would despoil it for purposes of their own, there is 
little hope of realizing any educational ideals. There is to be nothing 
in or about the schools which does not make for absolute freedom 
in shaping courses, in securing teachers of the highest and most 
uniform excellence, or in assuring to teachers their free opportunity 
to inspire, to train and to uplift. But such freedom can only go 
with confidence. Wherever the school system lacks in symmetry 
and efficiency and so in self-confidence and resistive power, it is 
peculiarly open to experiments which ought to be forbidden and to 
demands which should be resisted, but which it lacks both the sense 
to resent and the strength to resist. Wherever it has such sense 
and strength, frivolous experiments and partizan demands do not 
so much persist. So the school system is going from good to better 
— or from bad to worse. 

It seems paradoxical to some to say that freedom is based upon 



l6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

restraint. It is true of all freedom and as eminently true of educa- 
tional freedom as of any other. The schools can not be free in 
their making or in their teaching unless there is outside pressure, 
in the way of legal enactments and accepted understandings, which 
keep them hard at designated functions, and unless within them 
there are accepted standards and ends of teaching sufficiently defined 
and binding to assure the accomplishment of set and definite tasks. 
With the limits and requirements so defined, and with sufficient 
knowledge that they must be observed, there may be that liberty 
which is necessary to act upon one's own thought and experience 
and to follow one's own ways, which is so vital to real teaching. 

We can listen to no demand which is not made in the interest of 
all. We can willingly permit no advantage to one as against another. 
It would be as well to acquiesce in the government of the schools 
by a sectarian denomination as by a political party. They are to be 
governed by teachers who are free and have experienced educational 
opinion, working in harmony and respect with laymen who stand 
for public sentiment and the common interests and who serve no 
master save the great people whom they represent and the mighty 
democratic advance whose picket guard they are. 

SOME LEGITIMATE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 

I have been trying to point out — and let me say that you know no 
better than I how inadequately I have succeeded — some of the 
principles which ought to move us in conceding or in resisting the 
innumerable demands upon the schools. As my mind reverts to the 
ground I have traversed it is impressed with the fact that, perhaps 
naturally enough, I have been thinking of the troublesome things 
in administration, and treating, for the most part, of the unworthy, 
rather than of the legitimate demands upon the schools. But the 
wrongs and the troubles pass away and are forgotten. Things 
which should not be, do not last. Things accomplished, make other 
steps in the golden stairway of opportunity and are the things 
which stay. They are the matters of real concern. 

Let no demand for the help of men and women be lightly taken. 
If one who knows the fields' and woods moves us to have others 
know them better, let us say that he is right and try to have it so. 
If an old soldier of the Grand Army of the Union would have us 
do a little more to quicken the love for the flag so dear to him, let 
us try to do it. If one with an eye for the beautiful and a heart for 
the clean demands that a school building, in and out, be attractive 
and wholesome, free from filth and helpful to health and to better 
living, let us not be annoyed but try to make it so. If youth can 



THE DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS 1 7 

not foresee and can not ask for inspiration, let those who do see 
and understand give the word that may unlock the very depths. 
Even if the truth halts and conscience sleeps, let us recall that it is 
not strange, and offer the help that may meet their mute claims. 
If a mother has a feeling, which she shows but can not name, that 
her daughter should be taught by one no less a woman and no less 
a gentlewoman than herself, let us not resent it but do what may be 
done to have it so, and not only so for her, but for all. If a father 
fears that his son's time is being wasted by one in a teacher's place 
who can not teach, and thinks it his business to know about it, 
let us be glad that there are such fathers and remember that that is 
precisely what fathers are for. Let us look and see if his complaint 
is just and if it is, help him to the highest right on earth to him. 
If any unselfishly apprehend that the plans of the schools do not, 
in the largest measure, serve the purpose of the state, let us put 
our heads together to make them do it. But let us not make the 
mistake of thinking that these things may be done by adding courses 
or by multiplying devices. Before boys and girls give much sup- 
port to the state, they will have to do a whole lot of business for 
themselves. It makes not so much difference what it is, if they 
have enthusiasm for it, if it is hard enough to make them tired, and 
if they hold to it long enough to have the satisfaction and the 
growth which go with accomplishment. Make the situation cheer- 
ful and move with certainty. Insipidity is a worse fault than brusque- 
ness in one who lays any claim to be a teacher. But confidence and 
steadiness and considerateness are better than either. Never let 
the idea gain ground that the schools are to support the pupils in 
any degree in order to help them. Tell them the gospel truth that 
the only way they can ever be of any account is by knowing things 
on their own account and doing things for themselves. See that 
the word " charity " is never set above the door. Write " oppor- 
tunity " over the portals and do what you may to have the children 
enter in. As we consolidate the educational system, we gain added 
triumphs for popular education. Bring the support of all the 
schools to the support of each, so that every one may have the 
utmost; but remember that after the elementary schools the greater 
number will leave when they must. See to it that whenever they go 
they have the utmost that can be given them up to that time. And 
at whatever time they go, see, if you can, that they carry with them 
not only the rudiments of learning, which will help them to do almost 
everything in this country, but also that they carry with them the 
elementary factors of true and ambitious living. 



CLAIMS OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM UPON THE 

COLLEGES 

REMARKS AT A CONFERENCE OF UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE PRESI- 
DENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES HELD AT THE EDUCATION DE- 
PARTMENT, ALBANY, N. Y., ON NOV. l8, I904 

The representatives of 22 universities and colleges in the state 
have kindly responded to my invitation to meet with the leading 
officials of the State Education Department in conference. The 
institutions have my thanks for such general representation. 

I owe it to you to explain the reasons for my invitation, and to 
suggest what it is hoped to accomplish. This I will endeavor to 
do — not in an address, but in the notes or skeleton of an address. 

There is probably no precedent for a state educational official 
summoning the colleges to the Capitol. If there is a foundation 
of fact and reason for it, there is no compulsory process for it. 
The coming is voluntary, and the fulness of it is encouraging-. 

I have been led to the step by two leading considerations. The 
first is that the reorganization and the unification of the state edu- 
cational work now in progress give emphasis to the need of closer 
articulation of the upper and the lower schools in the state educational 
system, and create the conditions which make it practicable to 
effect it now. The second is that my recent ten year service at 
the head of the state university of a state where effective coope- 
ration between the upper and the lower schools is much closer than 
in the Atlantic States, gives me a keen realization of the importance 
of it to both the schools above and the schools below, and to the 
entire educational system. 

The State Department holds every legitimate educational instru- 
mentality and activity, whether supported by tax or not, to be a 
part of the state educational system. The Department is bound to 
stand indifferent between the special interests of institutions, except 
as directed by the statutes. It is to aid all, without favoritism, and 
claim the help of all, without discrimination. 

It is hoped, through this conference and what will follow it, to 
equalize and clarify and consolidate college thought concerning the 
wisest college policies, and to bring the most mature and substantial 
assistance to all the educational activities of the state. 



CLAIMS OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM UPON THE COLLEGES 19 

When I come to speak of specific points upon which the Depart- 
ment desires to effect understandings and to establish closer rela> 
tions with you, I beg you not to forget that my thought is not 
special, but general. We shall only drift — and with our opportuni- 
ties and responsibilities drifting would prove the unworthiness of 
leadership — if we do not squarely and seriously meet many more 
questions of educational policy than I shall specify, which are 
peculiar and vital to this state. 

A state educational system should be balanced. It will be strong 
and aggressive when the different parts stand in their proper rela- 
tions, when each receives the consideration it is entitled to and each 
exerts the influence it may. 

I venture to express the very earnest desire that the interest 
which the colleges really have in all of the educational activities of 
the state may be made more apparent, and that the college influ- 
ence may be more decisively asserted. It will be a vitalizing and 
uplifting force upon the lower and upon the middle schools, it will 
penetrate all of the concerns of the commonwealth, and it will 
react upon the colleges themselves. 

In this you and your associates may render us a special, and I 
am sure a grateful, service. But it can hardly be a casual or an 
offhand service. If you can take the time and have the inclination 
to ascertain completely the conditions of the schools below you, 
and to conclude deliberately upon sound treatment, your conclu- 
sions will have marked and unusual value. 

It is therefore hoped that this movement will quicken the interest 
of the college men in all of the educational activities of the state,, 
not for the sake of the preeminence of one's own institution, but of 
education in general; that it will lead to more exact knowledge of 
the conditions in the schools outside of the colleges and to clear and 
feasible opinions about the policies for which we ought to stand. 
I am not referring to the interests which the state ought to support 
with appropriations, but to the administrative and teaching policies 
which the consolidated educational and professional opinion of the 
state, and therefore the State Education Department, ought to 
advocate or sustain. 

The state stands ready to do whatever it is well to do for the 
support of education, but the state is bound to demand that there 
shall be within its borders an educational sentiment which knows 
rather clearly what ought to be done, and that the large expenditures 
be well and wisely made. All that is necessary is the continuance 
and enlargement of public confidence in the educational work of 



20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

the state to gain for her a distinct and admitted educational pre- 
eminence. 

The best attention of the college men and women is not only 
wanted for boys and girls after they go to college, but before they 
go, and perhaps even more for the great army who do not go at all. 
This Department not only stands for the state in aiding and over- 
seeing the public schools, but for encouraging all schools and for 
stimulating all of the agencies of culture and learning outside of 
the schools. If college sentiment will focus and crystallize upon 
these great educational concerns of the state, as it clearly ought 
to do, it may have expression and feel assured of result and effect. 
But, it must be added that it can not be through mere theoretical 
or academic discussion, carried on for the intellectual amusement 
there may be in it, but through real knowledge of situations, famil- 
iarity with the world's best thought, and serious purpose to be of 
service to a great cause. 

1 have always had the feeling that the great school system should 
be the laboratory of collegiate educational departments ; that the 
regular schools should provide the material for investigation and 
discussion and that conclusions should be based upon ordinary pupils 
and the common order of things; that colleges should not trench 
upon the field or employ the methods of the normal schools ; and 
that the whole school system has claims upon the liberal learning, 
wide reading, long and large experience, and philosophical thinking 
of the college men. It is clear to me that these claims are not upon 
collegiate departments of education alone, but upon all college 
teachers and that they bear specially upon the presidents of the 
higher institutions. It is equally clear that colleges are anxious 
-enough to render this service, but that they are not specially suc- 
cessful in doing so; that it takes considerable time, thought, and 
adaptation to do it. But in the end nothing seems more manifest 
than that the advanced institutions which are really able to make 
themselves most useful to the educational system of the country 
enjoy the readiest and the largest measure of prosperity. 

Now is the time to assert the claims of the educational system upon 
the colleges, and now is the time for the response. May not the 
Education Department lean upon the colleges of the state? 

Just now we want your deliberation and judgment upon these 
points, 

i The recognition which ought justly to be given to college work 
in relieving teachers from examination, 

2 The character and quantity of work in the professional courses 



CLAIMS OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM UPON THE COLLEGES 21 

on teaching in the colleges, necessary to command the approval of 
the Department, 

3 The preparation of a syllabus covering such approved courses 
in education in the higher institutions, 

4 The question as to the advisability of shortening the term of 
study for the combined baccalaureate and medical degrees, so that 
it shall not exceed seven years, 

5 The desirability of uniform reports which will afford accurate 
data, from the colleges and universities. 

Doctor Rogers, who has special oversight of the field of higher 
education, will lay upon your desks these questions in more exact 
and pointed form, and your advice concerning them will have much 
weight upon the attitude of the Department. 

But I am anxious that more than a mere declaration upon sub- 
mitted points shall result from your attendance. Serious questions 
will constantly arise in an educational system which keeps marching. 
May we not establish the understanding that as occasion arises the 
Commissioner of Education may specify such questions to the heads 
of advanced institutions, and then feel free to summon a conference 
for a comparison of opinions and a declaration? Of course, it can 
not be said that this would be binding upon the Department, but 
it would certainly have great weight and, whatever the ultimate 
-conclusion, serious effort to help the school system would merit 
appreciation and thanks. Possibly it would do more. It might 
bind us together more strongly in the common brotherhood and give 
energy and guidance to a decisive movement for the distinct educa- 
tional preeminence of New York. 



THE SUPERVISION OF THE COUNTRY SCHOOLS 

AN ADDRESS AT THE FIFTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF NEW YORK 
STATE SCHOOL COMMISSIONERS AND SUPERINTENDENTS, AT 
SYRACUSE, N. Y., ON NOV. 21, I904 

There are 9500 " country schools " by the side or at the corners 
of the roads in the Empire State. Each has from one to a score of 
children of all ages with just as good stuff in them as any in the 
state. For the .most part they are in one room houses, grown old 
long ago, without many of the necessities, to say nothing of the 
conveniences, of modern schools. The teachers are better " trained " 
and in many ways " smarter " than they used to be, but whether 
they have more fiber or teaching power is not free from doubt. 
There certainly has been a serious loss of forceful men who now 
find other promising and permanent employment, and who used to 
teach because there was little else for them to do. These humble 
schools do about whatever in the way of drill and research the 
teacher wills. They serve a little hamlet or a dozen farms which 
stretch a mile or more away and they are governed by the annual 
school meeting of the people who sustain them and by the trustee 
whom they choose to execute their will. The state gives them con- 
siderable aid and lays down the fundamentals for them and then 
leaves them very largely to themselves. It can not be said that they 
are unworthy. On the whole, they fill their humble station and serve 
their stately purpose very well. They can not be artificially inflated 
or quickened without results which will be both temporary and unde- 
sirable. But they are of just as much concern and ought to have 
just as much thought and care on the part of the state as any other 
part of the educational system. 

I am glad to admit a little bit of personal feeling about them for 
the first school to which I ever went was one of them. It was in a 
weather-beaten house, with desks put together by a rough carpenter 
and " finished " if not ended by boys who knew how to get jack- 
knives and understood how to use them. The house was old fifty 
years ago, and still persists in holding on in a way which becomes 
the neighborhood. It is where the roads meet, at the foot of over- 
hanging hills, hard by a silvery stream which threads as attractive 
a valley as any country ever had. The white house and the rugged 



THE SUPERVISION OF THE COUNTRY SCHOOLS 23 

farm across the road had then been our family homestead for three 
generations. There a young soldier, fresh from the army of the 
Revolution, had gone to clear a farm and make a home in the wilder- 
ness, and there children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren 
in goodly number had come along to put some graceful lines upon 
the strong and rugged face of nature. Character established and 
things done had written a name upon the neighborhood. There was 
dignity, repose and comfort; there had been deep pleasures, and 
there had been some keen sorrows and disappointments. The 
people were kindly and open-handed : their doors were always open 
and their larders always full. They were not ignorant, and surely 
they were not of the soft and insipid kind. They had reserve power 
and they also had outlook and purpose. Books and papers were not 
very abundant but they were of a kind which made an impression 
upon life. They combined with work — hard, grinding, continuous 
work — to turn out men and women who believed in something and 
could do things. Habits were exact and the results ample. If an 
unregenerate child lost his resolution, the routine of the home and 
his father's word were likely to recover it for him. If life was 
simple, it had phases which were intense. Religion seldom lagged 
and patriotism never wabbled. The district school and the village 
church, a mile away, were alike sustained with apostolic zeal and 
attended with a regularity which wind and weather never halted 
and ! with a regard for time which would do honor to the sun. 

There were such conditions and such people, with no very material 
differences, scattered all over the hillsides and all along the valleys 
of New York fifty years ago. My origin was among them, and 1' 
am proud of it. I have always been quite as familiar with conditions 
in the country as in the cities and always expect to be. I have not 
only had a considerable part in overseeing the rural school system, 
but -I taught for two years in rural schools. They were as happy and 
as profitable years as I have ever had. My mind goes back to them 
now with satisfaction. I not only gained some of the pleasures but 
some of the resentments from the teacher's side. If there is any 
thought that I am without both information and interest concerning 
the country schools, it ought to be dismissed. I never pass a boy 
on a rural highway without wanting to get down and talk to him. 
I never see a one room country schoolhouse without some rather 
definite thoughts about things which I should like to do for it. I 
never come upon a question which concerns the country school and 
its teacher without going back to the time when I was so circum- 
stanced and so concerned, and without a very keen desire to do the 



24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

thing which will be of service to them. It has seemed not improper 
to recur to these personal phases of the subject because they really 
have a considerable bearing upon the worth of my ideas concerning 
the attitude which the State Education Department ought to bear 
towards the educational interests of the people who live in the small 
villages and upon the farms of the state. 

Half a century ago the industrial and economic conditions in all 
those parts of the state outside the half dozen considerable cities 
were very much alike. They are very unlike now. The trans- 
portation and commercial activities have built up many large 
centers of population and a great many more smaller ones 
which have attracted the boys of most resources and strongest 
ambitions. If the living has not been better in the cities, the 
farmers' boys have thought it was. It is common to think that 
something which is a long way off is better than anything one 
can make near home, and it is also a very common mistake to think 
so. Of course the opportunities for exceptional men have been more 
and greater where the most people are and where the largest things 
are done, but I am convinced that the opportunities for ordinary 
men, who will put as much of mind and muscle into work in one 
place as in another, are quite as good on the farm as in the office 
and the market place ; and I am convinced also that for them the 
pleasures of the stomach and of the mind are likely to be quite as 
great in the old home as in a new one. It is not to be denied that 
the immediate needs of the quickly accumulating great centers of 
population, with the inordinate acquisition of wealth and the extrav- 
agant gratification of the whims which wealth begets, has led the 
manufacturing, as well as many other lines of industry to outstrip 
the agricultural industries. In the very nature of things the people 
in the towns have had the advantage, and the farming interests 
have been very greatly depressed. 

It is not strange if it is so, but whether strange or not it is a 
fact that the farmers have not been quick to readjust their opera- 
tions to the new conditions. It is idle to be doing the same things 
now that were done when the farm had to supply everything that 
the farmer had. Things are to be done now with a view to an 
exchange of commodities. You might as well try to tip the state 
up and make the Hudson river run back into the Adirondacks as 
to be raising little patches of short ears of corn to compete with the 
marvelous output of the lands which were specially made for corn 
and stretch across the great prairies of the country, if you are 
working for commercial prosperity and good living. And the 



THE SUPERVISION OF THE COUNTRY SCHOOLS 2$ 

youngsters will not be content, and ought not to be content, to 
work for anything less. The time was when a farm which lived by 
itself alone was quite as sumptuous a place to live as could be found. 
But it is not often so now. It is to give and take in trade and to 
produce the things with which it can trade. It is idle to conclude 
that farms within a few hours of the greater number of the largest 
cities in the country can not make a good and comfortable living, 
and can not pay a good return on the investment, if managed by 
men and women with wits to see what those cities will be glad 
to buy. 

If the steam road and even the trolley have not gone or will not 
go quite everywhere, the improved highways, the daily newspaper, 
the quick and free mail deliveries and the telephone have reached 
or are destined to reach, at no distant day, about every farm in the 
•state. They are the evangel of better conditions upon the farms, 
If these are used and if in addition to them practical experience is 
joined with scientific research to determine what these New York 
lands can do best, and how to do it, the farms will be quite as good 
as, or a little better than the cities to spend the wits and the strength 
with which the Almighty has gifted and commissioned us to knock 
out the best living that we can. 

The farmers have the right to demand aid from the state, but 
it is as true of farmers as of manufacturers that they have no valid 
claim upon the state for the things which they can do better than 
the state can do them, or for the things which they can do quite 
as well without as with the aid of the state. Practical experience 
and brain and brawn can not do everything. They may keep inves- 
tigation from going daft. They may set the limit upon things 
which can not be done, but they are hardly likely to realize the needs 
of the near-by or of the remote but available markets. They can 
hardly deal with the means of transportation, and they are hardly 
to be expected to exploit the potential possibilities of lands for 
unfamiliar products demanded by new markets. These are things 
the state should do, — and the state is trying to do them,, with new 
interest and new energy in recent years. 

The public men and the .public prints of the state are studying 
economic questions bearing upon the farms, and are throwing over 
the state a flood of light to the advantage of the farmers, and the 
state has given a considerable amount of money to promote scien- 
tific research along agricultural lines. And the manifest activity 
and new forcefulness with which the agricultural organizations are 
urging and demanding all this is not only highly commendable but 



26 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

highly gratifying - to all who are interested in the industrial pros- 
perity and intellectual preeminence of the state. It honors their 
foresight and betokens what will be. 

Inasmuch as the state is giving such substantial aid to the pro- 
motion of New York agriculture, it may be well to try to set the 
lines of activity and of investigation so that they will lead to results 
which are worth the while. We may as well go bluntly to the point 
of it all. These Empire State farms must be made to earn more 
money, so that more people will want them, and so that the strongest 
people will want them. The men who are informed about the agri- 
cultural activities of the world and the men who are scientifically 
adapting merchantable products to diversified soils and climatic 
conditions must show us how to do it. It will not be enough to try 
to develop a love in all of us for rhododendrons and four-leaf clovers, 
although that is a good thing to do. It will not suffice to load the 
overburdened schools with elementary agriculture when the average 
teacher can not assimilate it and the average school in the city can 
not follow it, and the average school in the country, for obvious 
reasons, will not. It will not meet the demands of the situation to 
dwell with vehement rhetoric and attractive pictures upon the 
fanciful and pleasant features of rural life, where money is abun- 
dant and the earning capacity of land is not the first consideration. 
The economists and the scientists must go past all that and show 
what can be done to enable New York lands to make more money. 
When that is done the farmers will copy one another and in time the 
state will make the most of it and then a whole lot of other and 
very desirable things will be sure not to remain undone. 

We need never expect to go ba'ck to the time when our hills and 
valleys were all at repose, when the needs of good living were simple 
and inexpensive and the farm provided all the necessaries of life in 
abundance and had plenty for generous hospitality, and when the 
farmer and his household were independent of the rest of the world 
except as his large and open heart made him a good neighbor and a 
good citizen. The neighborhood has infinitely expanded. We arc 
upon the times and the conditions when he must stand in inter- 
dependent relations with all the people and all the commercial 
activities of the country. He must know this and the state must 
recognize it and both must act upon the information. If he puts 
his head and his nerve and his energy into the business, if he sees 
clearly the part of the problem which must of necessity depend upon 
himself, and if the state cooperates in a general way, as it is bound 
to do and as it is disposed to do, the value of farm lands will start 



THE SUPERVISION OF COUNTRY SCHOOLS 2.J 

on a sharp and ascending curve and a vast number of very desirable 
consequences will follow in the wake of it. 

It would not be surprising if you were to think that I have not 
kept very closely to the problem of the rural schools, but I believe 
that I have been dealing with the essential fundamentals of the sub- 
ject. The basis of good school privileges under free government 
must be found in the industrial prosperity of the people. It is more 
than idle to complain of changes in conditions which work to the 
disadvantage of one class of people or of one section of the territory 
of the state, if foresight or new plans will remedy the trouble. It 
is folly to urge that the state must make up for losses which must 
come to any class or to any section through new conditions. The 
people must support the state, — not the state the people. The state 
must follow general policies which are as helpful as may be to all 
and are yet not in conflict with this principle, and the people must 
do the rest for themselves or bear the consequences. If no one had 
to take the consequences, energy would have but little incentive and 
accomplishment but slight reward. It is as true of the schools as 
of anything else. The state must have plans for the schools which 
are of general application. No state can support the schools of 'a 
free people, for that would mean that one part of the people were 
supplying essential institutions and instrumentalities to another part, 
and then that other part would not be free. New York has gone 
much farther than any other state in the Union, or' than any other 
self-governing country in the world, — infinitely farther than any 
other people having anything like our measure of local free govern- 
ment, in laying taxes upon the cities to aid the schools in the farming 
districts. It is to the lasting honor of her people that this has 
become a fixed policy of the state and that it has provoked no 
serious complaint in any quarter. But while that must aid and 
encourage, it can not become the substantial foundation of the rural 
schools. Their strength must be found in the prosperity and the 
self-dependence of the rural people. 

The drift of the population from the country to the towns has of 
course had its effect on the country schools. It has given relatively 
preater importance to the larger schools in the cities. The finer 
buildings, the closer supervision, the more impressive display, the 
extended course of study, the grading of pupils, the more elaborate 
appliances, the more exact training of teachers, and particularly the 
development of the free high schools in all the cities, have forced 
the country school to a place of apparent insignificance in the edu- 
cational organization of the state. And it must be admitted that 



28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

the loss to the rural schools through the movement to the towns- 
and the going of larger numbers of the most ambitious young people 
to higher schools or into business at an early age, instead of serving 
their country and themselves for a time as teachers, has been quite 
as real as it has been apparent. Those young men and women had 
something in them which served the ends of the little red school- 
house and served them well, and which no system of normal training 
and no scheme of examinations is likely to supply. It used to be 
said that the school must have a teacher who could teach it as well 
as keep it, and that was true, but the inference that one who could 
keep it could not teach it was not true. When the school required 
a strong character to keep it, the one who could do it was quite as 
likely to teach it as he was to keep it and a good deal more likely 
than one who could not keep it at all. There were some things in 
the palmy and heroic days of the country school which are not so 
pleasant to recount, but the circumstances which have caused the 
sturdy teacher to seek other worlds to conquer and have caused so 
manv of the sturdy youth who wrestled with the sturdy teacher 
for the mastery to disappear in the bedecked sprig who wears a 
" Tuxedo " and eats fine pastry, without knowing that nothing but 
work will make men and without either the moral or the physical 
courage to take care of himself under assault or to make a golden 
road to a competency or possibly to fame for himself, have undoubt- 
edly brought us compensations, but they have clearly inflicted 9ome 
very distinct losses upon education and upon the country. 

I may tell you that I have never wasted a very great deal of 
sympathy upon the country school, for I have always felt assured 
that there was much in country life which equipped young men and 
women for doing things in the world whether they were so much 
impressed with the contents of the books and the set methods of the 
schools or not. Of course it is necessary that they shall be pos- 
sessed of the elements and instruments of knowledge, and they ordi- 
narily are, and when they add to this the discipline and the power 
of accomplishment which come out of continuous and rather severe 
physical labor, from the time when they are old enough to work, 
they are possessed of arms and armor more promising of result 
than any which the schools alone are likely to give. But I am begin- 
ning to wonder whether the conditions which have gone so far to 
isolate the farm in the last generation have not" had some depressing 
influence upon the quality of the boys and girls who are born upon 
the farm and also upon the quality of the work and the exact rou- 
tine of the place, which has been quite as unfortunate as the failure 



THE SUPERVISION OF COUNTRY SCHOOLS 29 

of the country schools to keep rank and pace with the educational 
advance, and whether the two taken together do not claim the most 
serious consideration of the state. 

The West is menaced with what seems to be a very decided and 
very unfortunate tendency toward tenant farming, In the country 
in which I have been living for the last ten years the farm lands 
are worth close to two hundred dollars an acre and are hardly upon 
the market at all. They are largely worked by tenants. The owners 
live in the towns and get ample, if not satisfying, returns upon that 
valuation. The lands are worth so much that one who owns them 
does not want to work them but seeks the advantages of town life. 
Is there a corresponding menace in the low market value of eastern 
farms ? If there is, then there is abundant reason for decisive meas- 
ures on the part of the state which will give new turns to agricul- 
tural plans and processes which will bring the farms into closer 
relations with the other property of the state and with the other 
activities of the state, to the end that they may be sufficiently 
remunerative and attractive to the most substantial resident farmers. 
Good roads, trolleys, telephones, regulated transportation rates for 
people and products, scientific research into economic questions and 
into the chemical constituents and adaptability of the soils, with 
schools standing in a new and closer relation to the educational 
system of the state, ought to do it. 

Conditions which are well understood served to lessen the relative 
value of New York farm lands and products in the property assets 
of the state, and the same conditions with some others served to 
separate and isolate the rural schools from the school system of the 
state. I am confident that at no very remote day the farms will 
come to their relative consequence again, and that upon that fact 
must largely turn the worth and prestige of the rural schools. But 
I surmise that there are some things that may be done through the 
state educational organization and upon the purely educational side 
of the subject, to bring those schools into more complete relations 
with, and so into their old time and their rightful importance in, 
the educational system. 

The unity of the school system, and so the equality of the schools 
so far as that is possible in widely differing conditions of population 
and resources, is dependent upon the legal scheme of organization 
and perhaps more upon the system of professional supervision. I 
do not believe that efficiency is dependent upon numbers or upon 
grading. There are advantages and disadvantages upon both sides. 
There ought to be just as much inspiring of children and just as 



30 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

good teaching in an ungraded as in a graded school, and with that 
there ought to be more rapid progress for many in the country 
school than in the one which is so large as to make rigid classifica- 
tion necessary. Of course equal progress is dependent upon send- 
ing children to school with regularity and punctuality, and upon 
terms of school as long as those in the towns. Farmers' children are 
not so much brighter than other children that they can be worked 
to the limit before school time, be kept from getting to school on 
time, be taken out of school whenever there is work to do around 
the barn, or in the fields, or in the kitchen, and then make the same 
progress that other children do who are kept at their studies with 
exact and conscientious regularity. But attendance being equiva- 
lent, that is with, the same amount of moral support on the part of 
the parents, the rest is very largely dependent upon the relations 
of the little school to the educational system, and upon the closeness 
and professional competency of the supervision which determines 
the effectiveness of the teaching. 

I have never pinned much faith upon the proposition to change 
from the district to the township system of school government. 
Once in an old report I said a brief word looking in that direction 
but I have never felt strongly convinced of the wisdom of it. If 
it would equalize the taxation for school purposes in all parts of 
the town it would extend the control also. I am not sure but it 
would make for more than against politics in the management of the 
schools, and in that case the little schools would get the worst of it, 
and it would also apparently lessen the interest in the neighborhood 
and the control of the neighborhood over the affairs of the neighbor- 
hood school, and I believe in a very large measure of control on the 
part O'f the neighborhood over the business affairs of the neighborhood 
school. If it works badly in some cases it brings good to the people 
and good to the school in many more cases, and in more ways than it 
is now necessary to enumerate. 

Nor do I believe that the troubles of the country schools are to be 
obviated by the public conveyance of children long distances to 
school. It may undoubtedly be done to advantage in some places, 
but it is far from a universal panacea. It is encompassed with dif- 
ficulties beyond the making of wagons and the employment of 
drivers. It is doubtless very well to enable districts to contract 
together under such a plan and to authorize a district to incur the 
expense of transportation in any case, or in other words that they 
be empowered to go as far as they will, in that direction, but it 
seems clear to me that the plan ought to be left to the free choice 



THE SUPERVISION OF COUNTRY SCHOOLS 3 1 

of districts and not forced upon the country school system. By this 
I do not intend to reflect upon the proposition, but only to say that 
it ought not to be forced because I do not conceive it to be a radical 
aid to the rural schools. In addition I do not believe that a school 
must be a large one or a graded one in order to be a good one. 

There is no difficulty in continuing the district system for man- 
aging the business affairs substantially as it is now and establishing 
a system for supervising the teaching which shall have units of 
territory large enough to insure adequate pay for a competent 
superintendent, and still not so large as to make supervision im- 
possible. 

This has been the administrative theory upon which the educa- 
tional system oi the state has proceeded from the beginning, It 
worked well in the early days for all the schools were on the same 
level. It was a low level to be sure, but the privileges and rights 
of all were equal. It seems to me that the theory is sound and 
that it would work better now than in the pioneer days, but for 
the serious fact that the state has not reduced the supervisory 
districts to a size which makes modern supervision possible, has 
not insisted upon a supervision which is professional in the country 
as that kind of supervision has advanced in the towns, and has 
pursued a course which has caused the schools in the towns and 
cities to draw away from the schools in the outlying districts to an 
extent which has largely broken relations with them. It is not at 
all strange that this has been so, but the growth of resources and of 
public utilities with the new feeling in the state towards closer 
educational articulation, now make it quite possible to readjust mat- 
ters upon a better plan. 

From the beginnings of the school system it has been the policy 
of the state to leave the business management of the schools to the 
people. The state has made sure that every home, whether in the 
town or in the wilderness, had a school. It has insisted upon the 
fundamentals and prevented the people from ignoring or falling 
away from the essentials if in any instance they became so inclined. 
It has encouraged them to elaborate their schoolhouses and appli- 
ances, and pay for the best teaching, so far as their spirit and 
means will lead them to do, but it has always assumed to assure 
the character of the teacher and to control the quality of the teach- 
ing. This is the fundamental fact upon which the American school 
system rests, the fact which adapts the system to all conditions of 
population and gives it such virile beneficence to the nation and 
such a unique position- in the educational history of the world. 



32 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Even when the little hamlet of Dutch fishermen and fur traders 
established the first free elementary schools in America in the New 
Netherlands they had to be taught by professional schoolmasters 
sent over from the Old Netherlands for the purpose. Even when 
the English grudgingly permitted meager school privileges to those 
Dutchmen they put it into the law and into the royal decrees that 
the teachers should be approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury 
or the Archbishop of London. When soon after the Revolution 
the state made the first appropriation to encourage free schools 
and required all the towns to raise an amount equal to their appor- 
tioned share, — the first thing of the kind ever done in this country, 
it provided for district organization and trustees and then it created 
town commissioners under state direction to make sure of the char- 
acter of the schools. Twenty years later it provided for inspectors 
to act with the town commissioners. Having created the office of 
State Superintendent in 1812 it created a Deputy Superintendent 
in each county, and two in counties having more than 200 schools 
in 1 84 1. In 1843 the town commissioners and inspectors were 
abolished and a town superintendent was provided for, and in 1847 
the county superintendent was abolished and the office of school 
commissioner, with a district generally the same as the legislative 
district, was established. 

All these officers were under the direction of the state and were 
charged with the character of the teachers and the quality of the 
teaching. They were not professional teachers; they had almost 
unlimited powers concerning the certification of teachers; they 
were chosen at popular elections, and some of them got to giving 
out certificates for votes. In time the abuses were so common and 
so monstrous that the uniform examination system became neces- 
sary. It has gone farther than was at first contemplated, but per- 
haps no farther than the necessities required. In this it has left 
to the school commissioner the functions of supervision in a dis- 
trict which is so large as to be impossible of supervision, as we 
now understand the term, while very often the manner of his elec- 
tion produces a very likable man destined to be a very desirable 
force in the state, but without either special adaption or ambition 
for professional and exact supervision of the schools. 

Three steps seem to me to be advisable : 

1 That the supervisory district shall be made small enough to 
make real supervision practicable. 

2 That the supervisor shall be a man or woman whose business 



THE SUPERVISION OF COUNTRY SCHOOLS 33 

is teaching and who has the training and experience to qualify as 
a superintendent. 

3 That the outlying schools be associated with the central schools 
in supervision as a means of associating them in feeling, in spirit 
and in outlook. 

This would seem to point to supervision by township or perhaps 
in some cases by combining two or more townships. Possibly the 
same person might serve as principal of a central high school and 
also as superintendent of all the schools of the township. I have as 
yet no definite plan about it. I am not yet ready to suggest how 
superintendents might best be chosen. I prefer to leave the prin- 
ciples which seem to me very important and particularly the meth- 
ods for carrying them into effect to discussion. Experience has 
proved the wisdom of first inquiring what ends ought to be attained, 
then what are the sound principles of public action which ought 
to be observed, then what are the conditions to be reckoned with, 
and then what are the practical steps for gaining the needful ends. 
My purpose for the time being is accomplished when I call atten- 
tion to a very important subject, throw such light upon it as my 
position and my experience enable me to do, and submit the matter 
to the consideration of the men and women of the schools and all 
others interested in the affairs of the state. Discussion ordinarily 
leads to something when it ought to and it generally leads to nothing 
when it ought to. With the results we may well feel content. 

If my thought involves the abolition of the office of school com- 
missioner it ought not to be taken as reflecting upon the men and 
women who hold those positions. So far as I know, those men and 
women are worthy and without exception I would be of any proper 
personal service to them in my power. But conditions have largely 
and necessarily taken away from the office of school commissioner 
discretion over the examining and certifying of teachers, and school 
supervision has come to be of a kind which requires a frequent 
visitation of the schools by an official who is specially prepared for 
it. That is not possible in a territory so large as a rural assembly 
district, and it is too much to expect of an officer whose selection 
and position is not upon a distinctly educational footing. In other 
words, the conditions in the last fifty years have changed so decis- 
ively as to make a radical recasting of the plan established fifty 
years ago seem necessary. And incidentally it may be added that 
if such recasting terminated the positions of 113 school officials in 
the state it would make other school positions for such of them as 
have fitness and desire for school supervision, and if it hastened to 



34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

their life work those who do not intend to be permanently associ- 
ated with the schools they would be more than likely, whether they 
would at once realize it or not, to come soon to the time when they 
would thank us for it. In any event it would be unjust to think 
and I do not believe that the school commissioners of the state 
would be disposed to consider the subject in any other light than 
a patriotic one or to let any personal consideration count against 
the best interests of the rural schools. 

With the marvelous extension oif facilities for communication 
and transportation it may be about time to eliminate the old time 
problem of the country schools by bringing them all into better 
relations with the central schools and by unifying the system of 
supervision. We all agree that very much of the life of the modern 
schools is in the supervision, and if that is so the ten thousand little 
schools by the roadsides are entitled to a real share in it. They are 
of quite as much moment to the state, they hold quite as potential 
factors for the future political life of the state, as any other part 
of the educational system. The state is not to support them. It is 
not to manage their business affairs fori them. It is not to assume 
that some makeshift which removes them from local administration 
will save them; but as the time has come when it may it is to 
apply as close and as professionally competent oversight to their 
teaching as it applies to all the other schools of the state to advan- 
tage. It ought to bring them back into and lift them up into real 
and living relations with the state educational system, so that they 
may feel the thrill of the common energy and have their share in 
the common life. 

While the suggestion proposed in this address ought not to be 
advanced by the leading educational official of the state without a 
good measure of knowledge and much reflection, and while the 
points made are held with considerable confidence it may well be 
added, under all the circumstances, that it is not my purpose to press 
them to consummation without ample deliberation. The school 
commissioners of the state will be chosen at the next annual elec- 
tion. There is no thought of attempting to' change that fact at the 
approaching session of the Legislature unless opinions should ripen 
into common and favorable sentiment more rapidly than is antici- 
pated. As much as true progress is to be desired, the habit of work- 
ing together with . confidence in the sound purposes of all, and of 
reaching a decisive sentiment through deliberation and without 
acrimony is yet more to be desired, for this must go before very 



THE SUPERVISION OF COUNTRY SCHOOLS 35 

much or very substantial progress. We are all entitled to advance 
our opinions. It may be that some of us are officially charged with 
the responsibility of having and of asserting opinions. But the 
expressions of all of us are worth what they may be appraised at 
in the public forum and no more. They are to be subjected to 
analysis by the crowd. They may be adopted ; they may be rejected, 
and worse than all, they may be thought unworthy of either. But 
if individual thought does develop into public opinion we must all 
accept it and be content. 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 

AN ADDRESS AT THE SIXTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MASSACHU- 
SETTS TEACHERS ASSOCIATION AT BOSTON. MASS. ON NOV. 25, I904 

Mr President and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Massachusetts 
Teachers Association: In 1890 I came over to Worcester and made 
an address to your association. The agreeable memories of that occa- 
sion added some special satisfaction to your recent invitation. But I 
must admit some surprise at the theme you set me. In answer to 
an expression of my surprise your president, has said that it was 
because you wished the subject treated from the viewpoint of the 
general administrator rather than from that of a specialist in physical 
work or an enthusiast in athletics. So it must be. I know little 
about the structure of the body except that work seems to be good 
for all the parts. I would be the last man in the world to teach a 
boy how to walk on his hands or turn an air spring or do the giant 
swing, and I would run as fast as I could from any peril I could 
decently avoid. I shiver as much as I admire when I see a deed of 
physical daring, and if the crowd that I am with gets trounced on the 
athletic field, it is not in me to hear the excuses or console the 
losers or aid the injured. 

Something like an idea that the theories and contentions of the 
physical training teachers go down deeper into unscientific uncer- 
tainty than the subject warrants, might as well be admitted; and a 
fugitive thought that physical training or athletics is not a vital cor- 
ner stone of the school system ought hardly to be denied. On the 
other hand, it is not too much to assert some confidence that I bring 
as much appreciation of the relations of flesh and blood to mind and 
morals, as much admiration for the strength, the skill and the courage 
which can do things, and as much sympathy with those qualities in 
life which incline the boys and girls of the schools to open-air sports, 
as any one else would be likely to bring to the discussion. 

The belief that physical training is entitled to only a subordinate 
place in our scheme of popular education is certainly persistent, but 
assuredly that is not because of any indifference to physical sym- 
metry, strength and skill, or any doubt about the value of legitimate 
sport in rounding out the characters of men and women. Nor is it 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS ^"J 

associated with any misgivings about the advantages which must 
flow from the new and gratifying tendency to bring, so far as there 
is any real call for it, the training of the body and field sports, into 
some definite relations with the commonly accepted work of the 
schools. 

We know full well how a perfect body gives effectiveness to moral 
impulses, and how a handsome man adds the highest charms to a 
manly one. And we know, also, how strength and suppleness bal- 
ance minds, enlarge the resources of the home, and steady the course 
of the state. But we know, too, that the interdependence of the phy- 
sical, mental and moral attributes is not even. We recognize the 
attractiveness and the forcefulness of one in whom they are balanced, 
but. we ought not to fail to see that the intellectual and moral faculties 
are not as helpless without the physical as the physical is repugnant 
without the intellectual and the moral. A mere pugilist, even with 
the skill of his senseless art, is an offense to balanced men and 
women, while some of the finest gifts which minds and hearts have 
brought to the world have come from men and women who had no 
charm of physique with which to sustain them, and no strength with 
which to bear them to the unbelieving and the incredulous. 

Society need not do everything for its members and it is not 
bound to do all things in equal measure. Much must be left to in- 
dividuals, and on the .whole and in the long run the more 
that is left to individuals which they may well do, the better. 
The strength of the American nation has perhaps come from these 
two principles more than from all else together ; namely, that we have 
assured to every child the fundamentals of an education and then put 
upon him the burden of freedom — a chance to make the best of him- 
self, or the responsibility of gravitating to the underside. 

We may well invoke the doctrine of the simple official and the 
simple administrative, as well as of the simple personal life. Offi- 
cialism — the tendency to make more public work and spend more 
public money, particularly in view of the aggressive public spirit 
and of the abundant prosperity and ample resources of this country, 
may well be attended with some thought if not with some appre- 
hension. Surely 'this is not an unreasonable suggestion in view of 
the quite apparent enlargement of the demand for added support 
from the state and the no less manifest willingness to concede this 
by powerful and influential factors in the state. Without assuming 
a too confident attitude upon all the phases of a great political phil- 
osophy concerning which the more advanced thinkers are but just 
feeling their way, it can not be too much to say that — in view of the 



3& NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

enormous cost of the public school system and the greater expendi- 
tures that must surely follow — the men and women of the schools 
would better not anticipate public opinion and the definite authority 
of the people in adding any features which are not clearly essential 
to a program of work which is already overloaded, to an administra- 
tive responsibility which is already overweighted, and to an expense 
account which is already very long. 

The schools are not lacking in essentials, and they are liable to 
find some more. A school may have some nonessentials, but it 
should not unless the community is abundantly able, and the people 
understand the matter thoroughly. If more things are to be added 
to the work of the common schools, they should not be added by 
teachers or by ambitious superintendents without ample discussion 
and free approval by the people. Private schools may do whatever 
their patrons will support. But the free and state-enforced schools 
of the masses must assure to every child such rudiments of knowl- 
edge as are necessary to his free participation in free government 
and to his fair opportunity in the world. In all towns of any size 
in this country, high schools form a consistent part of the public 
school system. But the elementary schools will not be so good, 
nor the high schools so good or so universal, if in either case they 
are weighted beyond the means or the desires of the community 
with burdens not integral to their generally accepted plan. All beyond 
that must wait upon special circumstances and the willing support 
of the people. Happily, our American educational system is unique 
in the flexibility and adaptiveness which afford opportunity to 
special conditions and carry the schools along with the intellectual 
advance. 

Physical training is not one of the foundation things which the 
schools must everywhere assure. It is not as needful to the making 
of the perfect man as either mental or moral training. It is desir- 
able, but one may do without it better than without one of the 
others. The state leaves the moral training, except so far as it 
is inevitably and incidentally associated with the training of the 
mind, to the home and the church, because the different denomina- 
tions of Christians do not agree upon how much or what distinctly 
moral or religions training may be carried on by the common 
schools. There is no such exception taken to physical training. 
There is no objection to it on principle and therefore it is permissi- 
ble and desirable in communities where public sentiment will sustain 
it. But it is not so urgent anywhere as either the training of the 
mind or the training of the conscience because youth naturally 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 39 

helps and promotes its physical self more than its mental or its 
moral self. Very often its physical properties get on very well 
indeed if left rather largely to themselves. 

No indoor training is to assume to take the place of open-air 
play in the elementary schools. Calisthenics are unobjectionable, 
but with little people they are no substitute for natural play. Play- 
grounds may cost more, but they are worth more. No matter what 
they cost, it is the public business and function to provide them. 
Happy is the town which does it early, when it may do it well. 

If the buildings are hygienically pure, if there is sufficient air 
space and sunlight, if the mechanical appliances and the possibility 
of their refusing to work are kept at a minimum, if the grounds 
are ample and dry, and if teachers are sane about the relations 
of work and of freedom in children, there need be no fear for 
physical training in the elementary schools. 

This is not saying that special teachers who will quickly see the 
special needs of multitudes of children in the city schools and who 
will aid the class teachers to see the need of artificial exercise, 
which must often be substituted for real work or natural play, are 
not desirable in large systems of schools. I think they are; but 
the special circumstances ought to govern. 

It is not necessary to discuss the advantages or disadvantages of 
different systems of physical exercise. All have advantages and 
are practically beyond criticism. Adaptation to conditions is the 
paramount and not very serious question. Enthusiasts will not 
agree with me ; it is their mission in life to stand up for their own 
and they generally do it well. If we let them do that and give them 
their chance, they ought to be content without expecting that we 
will let any "system" own the schools. 

Passing from the elementary up to the secondary schools, we 
come' upon different stations, both as to the schools and the pupils. 
The schools are likely to be almost exclusively in congested dis- 
tricts. The pupils have gotten over the kind of play that is best 
for them. They have become more constrained and a trifle more 
conventional. They resent leading strings — and they know a lot 
that is not so. They are at a critical stage in the bodily develop- 
ment. They do need less care but a little more guidance, sympa- 
thetically and unostentatiously given. If the population is not dense 
there is little trouble for they get about all the help they require in 
"illis connection in their ordinary work and natural play, but at the 
centers of the cities it is hardly so. There a gymnasium is well 
and often practicable. There is no doubt whatever of the advantage 



40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

of regular work in a gymnasium, both for young men and young 
women. If they do not commence it at the high school age, they 
are not likely to do so at all. 

Whether the public high school should supply this desirable addi- 
tion to the opportunities of youth is not so much a question of 
educational necessity as of neighborhood feeling and expediency. 
Often there is no local need for one, and no local appreciation of 
the uses of one. Often, private enterprise or associated enthusiasm, 
like the Christian associations, the Turner societies or the athletic 
clubs, provide them. While the high schools are not bound to 
provide them, still, if the deliberate sentiment of their constituen- 
cies will sustain them in doing so, it may be done without invading 
any sound principle of the educational system. The difficulty is 
that when one school does it the others think they must, in order 
to be up to the times, and they undertake it upon a basis which 
can not succeed. A gymnasium is worthless unless thoroughly 
equipped and made inviting and unless managed by specialists who 
are themselves not only able to use the apparatus in attractive ways 
but are also sympathetic and inspiring teachers. Gymnasium work 
will be without result unless very regular and very persistent. With 
all these it will be with splendid result. Without a ready and 
popular support and a clear understanding of all the conditions 
which alone can assure results worth the while, it is safe to say 
that the establishment of a gymnasium in a secondary school is a 
move not to be encouraged. It must at all times be had in mind 
that so long as pupils live at home there are some things concerning 
them which may well be left to the homes to see to. 

When we come to the colleges and universities the conditions 
are again different. The students are away from home, with all 
that implies. Much closer mental application is exacted. The 
need of regular exercise is much ignored. Youngsters dare fate 
senselessly when they are free to do so, and in college they are 
likely to come into a larger freedom for the first time. The need 
of a complete gymnasium with ampje instruction, and required 
attendance at least in the freshman or the freshman and sophomore 
years, is manifest enough. Here gymnasiums are both necessary 
and practicable. Ready and sensible medical supervision of all the 
students and all the affairs of the institution is also very desirable. 

The physical training of a .whole body of students evenly is 
better than the training of a few elaborately. But inevitably some 
will excel and such will have special ambitions, and they will gain 
special attention. Good rivalries will ensue, not only between indi- 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 4I 

viduals in the same institution but between experts in different 
institutions. Then of course there will be the utmost effort and 
the most exact and complete preparation. 

I am not now referring to sports or games or to " teamwork " at 
all, but to the strength, endurance and skill of the individual man 
and to competitions where they are put to their highest tests. They 
are wholesome and quickening in every way — nothing .short of a 
spur to the schoolboys and an inspiration to the educated manhood 
of the country. If the notable contests are narrowed down to a few 
men in any one year, the opportunities are open to all, and very 
large numbers get the uplift which goes with them. The conditions 
of the competition are well settled, the management is exact, and 
the opportunities for frauds are very slight and the temptations hardly 
perceptible. The boys manage these contests themselves and beyond 
all doubt they manage them upon a plane so high that it ennobles 
the managers, pleases the contestants and satisfies all. The uncer- 
tainties do not invite betting. The disappointments are not deep. 
All honor the victor, and none more than his closest competitors, 
for none know the cost of the triumph so well as they. If the 
achievement is noteworthy, it is at once known in every part of the 
country. There is not a college boy worth to the country the salt 
which he eats who does not know that in 17 of 19 recognized ath- 
letic events the world's record is held in this country. Most boys of 
that kind can tell you -that in April last. Rose, of the University of 
Michigan, put the 16 pound shot 48 feet, y\ inches, and that on 
the same day Dole, of Stanford University, cleared the bar in the 
pole vault at 12 feet, iyifo inches, and that no one in the world 
had ever done so much before. They can tell you that in the 
eighth, quarter, half, mile, and 2 mile runs and in all the jumps 
save one, American boys have beaten all the other boys in the 
world. It makes some of us sedate ones dizzy, if it also makes us 
proud, when one American boy stands still and then jumps 11 feet, 
4| inches, and another stands still and then clears a bar at 5 
feet, 5 inches from the floor, under regulations and before the 
crowd, with nothing but strength, skill and courage to help them, 
— when we know that no one ever did the like before. 

The English say that we strive especially for the records rather 
than gain them from normal work ; that we concentrate supreme 
effort in a few, rather than get the benefits of the work for all ; 
and that we almost lose the point of physical training altogether. 
They must say something, and it must be admitted that there is 
something; in what thev saw But our wav is the American wav 



42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

and theirs the English way and we are both getting on very well — 
and we are all mighty glad that we are getting on so well together. 
We are each likely to tell the other much that it is very desirable 
to know. 

The intense application and the long and exact special training 
incident to these sharp contests seem to require caution against 
" overtraining " or the development of some part or function of 
the body at the expense of some other. There is danger enough 
of this to claim educated and experienced oversight. Aside from 
the possibility of this there seems to be nothing hurtful to the 
participants or demoralizing to the student body from this high 
grade physical work or from the ensuing contests. 

The distinction between physical training and " athletics " seems 
to lie between indoor and outdoor work; between what institutions 
do for students and what students do for themselves ; between work 
performed to keep health and promote strength, and sport for the 
excitement and fun that are in it; and between the work of an 
individual and that of a " team." 

By the way, a good part of the people over here in New England 
hardly seem to know what a team is. Probably the ones who think 
that a horse and wagon make a team, will hold that a boy and a 
bat make a baseball team, or a boy and a shin guard make a football 
team. But those of us who agree that it takes at least two horses 
to make a horse team will understand that it takes at least nine 
boys, with all appliances, to make a baseball team, and eleven boys 
with astonishing equipments to make a football team, and we are 
not surprised that it takes from fifteen to twenty boys to make a 
first-class baseball " nine " and all the way from twenty to forty 
to make a formidable football " eleven." But whether it be two 
or whether it be forty, the " nine " or the " eleven " pulling together 
make a " team." 

Any criticism brought against physical work in the schools is 
stirred by these team contests. No matter how many it takes to 
make a team, it takes thousands and more to make a game. The 
crowds of fervid partizans on either side ; the banners and streamers 
and songs and horns and calls and yells and yell- captains ; the 
officials and coaches and trainers, and doctors and rubbers and 
bottle bearers and scrubs and athletic statesmen, must all supplement 
the teams which struggle for the mastery and for the prestige of 
their universities, in order to have a game. There are some who 
dislike all this. If you are out for fun 'it is quite as well to have it. 
The men who know little about it are able to find enough to criti- 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 43 

cize. Old men, who never thumped one another when boys, are 
apt to be against it. Boys who do embroidery work while their 
mothers read poetry to them, men who want a fire engine or a 
lifeboat to slow down for fear something might break — without 
seeing that something must break if it does slow down, and men 
who hug the constitutional negatives after the council is over and 
the bugles have sounded the advance which must enforce the con- 
stitutional commands or save the Constitution itself, are hardly 
likely to be in love with games which turn upon strength, force, 
nerve, sense and skill. 

But the American crowd likes them. Training has to be sustained, 
perhaps required. The strenuous games attract the multitude, per- 
haps in a measure which has some perils in it. The fact that the 
crowd likes them is not against them. That people do go is no 
reason why they should not be allowed to go. The common feelings 
are not necessarily all wrong. The crucifixion of the flesh, the 
breaking of the spirit, have no part in modern ethics and no share 
in twentieth century teaching. The fair questions are, — Are these 
great games fraught with unpreventable evils which outweigh any 
good they may have? Are they on the whole good, or bad, for the 
youth of the country? And, what ought to be the attitude of the 
school concerning them? 

We would meet these questions squarely. To do that we must 
face the exact criticism and focus the discussion. Baseball is a 
natural college game. It is open and all may see all that occurs. 
It is not so technical that people who follow ordinary pursuits can 
not understand it. It is relatively free from dangers and while it 
attracts the throng it is not encompassed by many temptations. It 
comes in the spring when there must naturally have been almost 
a year of residence in college. Rowing has many good features and 
not many bad ones. It seems to encourage gambling in some 
measure, but otherwise is mostly beyond criticism. Tennis is ideal, 
but many young men want heavier work. Golf is hardly a college 
game ; it has been said that it is a state of the social mind. The 
game which holds the center of the stage in the fall and draws all 
the criticism is football. It has more ins with more outs than any 
other college game invented. The troubles with it are not in the 
high schools unless it is in the influence of the college game upon 
them. If there is trouble, it is in the college game itself, in the con- 
sequences to college boys, and the general bearing of the game upon 
the thought and feelingf of the countrv. 



44 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Let us put the criticism as pointedly as we may. This is what 
" they say." 

i That the game is dangerous and exhausting. 

2 That the 'varsity teams do not represent the bodies for which 
they stand. 

3 That the game makes heroes of men who have no right to 
the commendation of a democracy of learning. 

4 That men who give the time and energy required in success- 
ful football can not maintain positions as good students. 

5 That the coaching system is vicious, training men to evade 
the rules when that will aid success. 

6 That the greater part of the game can not be seen by spec- 
tators and that this aids the evasion of the rules, and worse; that 
it encourages real battle rather than open manliness and a chivalrous 
spirit on the part of the players. 

7 That it induces connivance on the part of students and gradu- 
ates, on the part of the sporting element in the community in larger 
measure, and on the part of college authorities in some measure, to 
get men who can play a strong game by paying them for it in one 
way or another, and without reference to their standing in college 
or their right to admission at all. 

8 That it is too expensive for sport and gathers more money that 
ought to be under the control of students, and that the game turns 
on factors which money brings into it and therefore that it does 
not afford a fair basis for intercollegiate contests. 

9 That it breeds a good deal of loafing, gaming and drinking 
and does not make for educational effectiveness and sound living. 

io That success is such a factor in college prestige and uni- 
versity preeminence, that the popularity of the game is so general, 
the pleasures of university triumphs, so delightful, the meaning to 
youngsters who are yet to go to college so significant, that the 
authorities fall short in courage to deal with the evils of it, and 
that these are degrading to the student life of the whole country. 

Now I feel assured that none will have the hardihood to deny 
that this list is sufficiently comprehensive, or that it is lacking in the 
effort to give point to criticism. 

Some will deny the facts or the reasonableness of the objections, 
but the facts are not overstated, nor is much of this criticism with- 
out reason. It may well be surmised that the game can not endure 
as a college sport unless such serious evils as common knowledge 
associates with it are admitted and corrected. If that is done, it 
must be by the men who manage or are responsible for it. 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 45 

The youngsters and some of the " oldsters " who know all about 
it won't tell as frankly as my friend Governor Black tells about the 
baseball team at his summer home in New Hampshire. He says 
they can never entertain any doubt about results. They make sure 
that among the neighbors' boys or the invited guests there is a 
pitcher from Harvard, a catcher from Dartmouth, a shortstop from 
Columbia, and a first baseman from Yale, etc., and then if there is 
any residuum of uncertainty they send over the mountains and hire 
professionals enough to guard against the possibility of any 
unseemly slip. That will do for a summer frolic or for an after- 
dinner speech in mitigation of a New York statesman's working 
himself to death over a farm in New Hampshire in vacation time, 
but it will hardly do for the regular order of intercollegiate contests 
in term time. Yet there are coaches and graduates and athletic 
politicians who could tell about as strong a story about college foot- 
ball, and tell the truth — if they would. 

As I have been reflecting upon this address I have been bringing 
together the evidences which have reached the public of unmistak- 
able fraud in getting and keeping men in the teams who are in 
college for nothing else. These evidences can not be presented 
here, but they may be indicated. One of the leading universities in the 
country is called upon to defend itself against the charge, brought 
upon it through the course of its athletic managers, that it has in 
its team a bruiser who has made the round of three or four universi- 
ties to play in this game ; another that it has a player who is a 
professional pugilist; and a third that its football team is largely 
sustained through political and other jobs which thinly disguise 
bribe money given to the players in order to keep them in the 
university. That the atmosphere of the game as now managed pre- 
disposes to gaming can hardly be doubted by any one with his eyes 
open. But with me it is not wholly a matter of inference. I have sat 
in a hotel lobby before a great game and seen scores of boys from 
two leading American universities daring each other to put up 
money on their respective teams, and when the dare was accepted 
and the terms settled, as frequently happened, they placed their 
money in envelops which they gave to the clerk of the house, to 
be delivered to the winner after the game. The thing could hardly 
have been worse and it surely would not have been more bald at 
a racing center and with professional sports. 

The advantages of the game are unmistakable. It makes for 
pluck, nerve, endurance, self-control and alertness in emergencies. 
Fair students who are successful football players are not only among 



46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

the very best men in college but their promise of marked success 
in life is exceptionally high. The game brings to many boys their 
first real ambition to do something better than others can do it. It 
smells of the ground and that is healthful — physically and mentally 
healthful. Its influence upon the thought and life of the players is 
quickening and steadying. It makes for generalship and for organ- 
ized effectiveness. I have no doubt about American football having 
had something to do with the new method of fighting and the new 
measure of energy and resourcefulness shown by American boys 
at El Caney and San Juan, at Manila and Santiago. Moreover, it 
is exhilarating and invigorating and it binds men together and 
develops class feeling and college spirit through splendid coopera- 
tive effort. It brings colleges to the fore in the thought of the 
masses. And it takes the conceit out of boys, and in many ways 
makes for genuineness in living. On the whole, it goes as far as 
anything else in the universities to make their thought square with 
the affairs of life and lead educated men to the places of the most 
decisive consequence in the concerns of a great people. 

It is all this which makes the game so well worth fighting for. 
But in the end it must be said that if these things are to be gained 
at the expense of fifteen lives and many hundred serious injuries 
in a season, or, worse yet, at the cost of a widening spirit of law- 
lessness, the cost is too great and all these advantages will have to 
be foregone or gained in some other way. 

All true and pure sport capable of use for college contests must 
be fought for. The better the sport the truer this is. As it becomes 
exhilarating and popular, the larger and meaner are the barnacles 
which fasten upon it. But the more quickening the struggle and 
the more uplifting the spectacle, the more it is worth contending for. 
To the young men and women who are in our universities, who 
know not much of physical effort and practically nothing of physical 
danger, (there is more legitimate leaven which makes for lives 
that can do things, in the rush and struggle, the strategic assault 
and defense of a 'varsity football team on a fall afternoon than is 
brewed in a good percentage of the college classrooms of the world 
in a semester. Then the game is worth purging and saving. Of 
course there are enough who think the game will last without cleans- 
ing. If it should, it would distinctly lower the educational and 
esthetic plane of American colleges and when that is ascertained 
something decisive will be done. Would, it not be better to do it 
now ? 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 47 

The evils may be put out of it by authority. Students may be 
expected to go as far in their excitements as the authorities who 
are charged with the duty of regulating their strenuosity and enthu- 
siasm will allow. They will have no difficulty in finding excuse for 
excesses which faculties live to see — and refuse to see. And with 
boys who have the stuff in them the outlook is clear or cloudy and 
moral fiber becomes firm or flabby as those to whom they look for 
commendation or remonstrance or punishment give, or fail to give, 
them about what is their due. 

Until all possibility of it disappears, the moral sense of America 
should rebel against any view of college government which leaves 
college boys to go to the bad without much hindrance. The theory 
that all a professor has to do is to be intellectually, or even immorally 
scientific, may have to go in some countries, but it should never be 
accepted here. Fathers . and mothers who give their sons and 
daughters over to any such intellectual leadership as that deserve 
the distress which unrealized hopes are likely to inflict upon them. 
It is not a question of college freedom. Freedom is not license 
anywhere. Freedom is stainless. There is no such thing as free- 
dom to do wrong, in college any more than in the state. I am not 
unmindful that the point of sport and of college contests is lost if 
college faculties manage them. Endow American sport or Ameri- 
can college athletics and you doubtless expel the soul and spirit from 
them. But students must distinctly know that their management 
must keep in step with good morals and in key with all the benefi- 
cent ends for which colleges and universities exist. More than the 
point of sport is lost if this is not so. 

If in any case students run amuck, or get to running the faculty 
amuck, the board would well install a new faculty, and if they 
should be too much for faculty and board together, parents would 
well withdraw their sons, benefactors would well withhold their 
gifts, affections would well be placed somewhere else, and what is 
left would well go down into the depths together: The right to have 
free contests and exhilarating sports and the right to gain the benefit 
of managing these for themselves is not to be confounded with the 
right to carry the college into unseemly places, or to gamble under 
the name and colors and lights of a university. Boys are to have 
freedom to manage college sports only when they realize that they 
are managing for all and when they manage in ways that hold out 
welcome to every honest man and bring no blush to any fair and 
modest cheek. 



4-8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

But let it be repeated that where the wrongs come in, it is less 
likely that they spring from student inclinations than from official 
inefficiency. Students sustain a government which governs. All 
they want to know is that it is strong enough to govern and that 
it is sane and sympathetic enough to govern well. 

Whether or not tariffs are to be regulated by their friends, it is 
mighty true that boys are. No man is much of a friend of boys 
who has forgotten about being a boy- who can not see things from 
the outlook of the boy, or who can not sympathize with the activi- 
ties in which every real boy must engage. 

If I were a university president I would not only have part in 
the athletics because I liked to, but I would use the sports to 
make management easy. I would go to the hurrah meetings as often 
as the crowd would welcome me, and I am confident they would 
welcome me as often as I was genuine about it. I would go down 
into the gymnasium pretty often, and before I started I would take 
off my shell and leave it in the sanctum. When the university lined 
up for an issue, I would be with it. I would pay my dollar and get 
into the crowd and yell for the flag, and if we won I would embrace 
a freshman quite as quickly as the professor of philosophy — who 
might be shocked by it. I would earn the right to have my word 
welcome at the athletic end of the establishment. I would not 
put it in very often. I would never impose it upon a boy manage- 
ment that was square and decent and right. But I would hold the 
right against the time when it was needed to bar out the vicious 
and temper the excesses : against the time when it would bind all 
the parts together and keep the whole upon the earth and rather 
near the middle of the road. On suitable occasions I would try 
to speak the word in the crowd which would marshal sentiment, 
set up standards and fix the pace. I would draw upon the moral 
sense which is never lacking in a college throng, to brace up the 
weak and cool off the heads that get unduly heated. If, after that, 
the bad persisted, I would join the issue so squarely that in a little 
time the air would be clearer and the outlook more encouraging, — 
or else the demonstration would be absolute that a new administra- 
tion would be a good thing to have. 

There ought to be no difficulty about the university managing 
the boys who manage the athletics, or settling the tone and character 
of the athletic work. The authority is as absolute as the responsi- 
bility is immediate. It is the common law of the schools that their 
authority covers everything that may aid their usefulness or stain 
their gfood name. None can use the name or flv the flag of an 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 49 

institution without submitting to its direction, or else being posted 
as a fraud. Only a sincere and authoritative word to any student 
should be sufficient. If students ever band together to resist the 
deliberate word of college authority, it is not altogether certain 
that they are wrong, but there is no possibility of doubt about the 
fact that they need a walloping that will last a student generation 
and be handed down to student generations which come after; or 
that the college needs a government that can govern. But happily 
be it said that such cases are so unusual as to be hardly in the reck- 
oning at all. 

Then let us hope that the great universities will serve the good 
cause of physical prowess and strenuous sport in all the schools by 
saving this game. If they request, the rules will be changed so as 
to make the game more open and attractive, less hazardous and 
unseemly, and so as to make the maiming of an opponent under the 
pile impossible. A university direction that none shall represent 
it in an interuniversity contest but a matriculated student who has 
been in residence a year, would very nearly settle matters. The 
factors of a game are bound to square with the honor of the uni- 
versity, and the management of the university is bound to see that 
they do. The insistence that the gate fees which are senselessly 
high, having amounted to $60,000 at a single game, shall be at a 
rate which does not discriminate against great numbers who love 
the sport and want to follow the flag, would be a good preventive 
medicine against a malady that is becoming too common and serious 
m university life. If, beyond this, it might become distinctly under- 
stood that there is nothing in common between a university and a 
saloon, and that it is a crime in the university, as it is in the state, 
for a boy to gamble on university contests, about all the grounds 
for the criticism which I have set forth would be removed. 

If it be said that these measures would take the life and the interest 
out of the game, I answer that I do not think so, but if so then the life 
ought to go. Any game which is not consistent with full college 
work on the part of the players ; any game which does not beget 
moral character and true manliness on the part of the truest lovers 
of sport; any game which must be handed over completely to pro- 
fessional coaches who use up boys to vindicate systems of coaching 
and who are strangers to the main and enduring purposes of college 
life, will have to go. If the enthusiasts are not on their guard, they 
will prove more than they would wish. 

Possibly I have occupied too much time with college athletics, 
but it comprehends the whole matter. Children imitate their sen- 



5° NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

iors; the schools below imitate the schools above. And they are 
more aggressive in imitating the vices than the virtues. The high 
schools and the little boys in the primary schools and the kinder- 
gartens imitate the play and the sports of the colleges, and they 
copy the worst phases without appreciating the best. Put college 
athletics upon a sound footing and you make matters easy for all 
the teachers and all the parents of the country. The responsibility 
of college authorities concerning the purity and influence of all 
play and sport, of all games and contests, is obvious and weighty. 
The better sentiment of the country should enforce the responsi- 
bility. The colleges and universities will willingly respond, but 
they need the support of insistent public sentiment. 

All of the responsibility is not upon the colleges. The extent 
to which students in the high schools are often encouraged to seize 
upon a freedom which is only permissible with older students, and 
to use it in dangerous ways, is absurd. It seems to be going from 
athletics to organizations and activities of every kind. The responsi- 
bility of boards of education and faculties is immediate and the 
authority is absolute. It is needless to say that whatever involves 
the good name of the school, that whatever concerns the moral 
sentiment of boys and girls, is to be dealt with. We all owe some- 
thing to them. I am for paying what we owe. 

Five or six years ago I had occasion to leave my home early on 
the morning after Thanksgiving — the morning corresponding to 
this one — to meet an engagement at a teachers association. On 
the way the football team from one of the central and conspicuous 
high schools of the country, who had been out to play a Thanks- 
giving game, came into the car on their way home. They had been 
victorious, and their conduct was beyond description. Boys of the 
high school age, who manifestly lived in respectable homes, seemed 
to think it manly to indulge in profanity and obscenity with a famili- 
arity which was shocking. They passed a bottle of liquor from one 
to another, and when the train stopped went out to have it refilled. 
The conditions were appalling and most suggestive. I think I 
owed those boys something : I did what I could to pay it. I think 
I owed the management of that high school something: I did what 
I could to pay that. But the supreme and controlling wrong of it 
all was that they should have been traveling alone and under such 
conditions at all. I lift up my voice against a view of athletics or 
administration which could make such a gross development, such 
a menace to young men, possible. Does one say that they are to 
take care of themselves, and to learn to do it by doing it? Yes, 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 5 1 

when the time comes, and gradually. Not at the high school age, 
nor at any other time if there is not sufficient promise of maturity 
and sense enough to do it. Parents and teachers are on earth to 
do it, and they had better not abdicate the function. 

Let me, in coming to a conclusion, recapitulate. This is my 
physical training and athletic creed up to date. But this, like all 
creeds, will perhaps need rewriting now and then : 

i Work and play are vital to the growth of physical symmetry, 
strength and skill, and the rounding out of the perfect man. 

2 The more real the work and the more natural the play, the 
better. 

3 Where these are lacking it is desirable to create artificial means 
for supplying them. 

4 Mind, heart and body are dependent upon each other, but not 
equally dependent. 

5 Physical training is not to be counted among the fundamentals 
or the essentials of the common school system ; it is not incom- 
patible with that system: special circumstances are to determine 
whether the schools should assume it. There is little call for it 
in the rural districts and small towns, but more where the popula- 
tion is congested and resources are ample. There is not much 
call for it in the primary schools, but more in the advanced schools. 

6 The main business of the common elementary schools is to 
initiate the correct use and expression of the intellectual faculties; 
with such reference to moral sensibilities as the regime of the system 
may impose and the opportunities of teachers, with correct moral- 
perspective, will afford — and with such regard for health and bal- 
anced physical development as sanitary schoolhouses and sane 
teachers, with a little general assistance by special teachers, in the 
cities, -make practicable. 

7 In the secondary schools special facilities for physical train- 
ing, such as gymnasiums, are quite permissible, but here too the 
conditions of population and the neighborhood feeling should govern,, 
and nothing should be undertaken without a good understanding 
of all that is involved, or without carrying out all that is attempted 
in good form and completely. 

8 In the advanced institutions physical training is practicable, 
should be provided for, and, generally speaking, may well be 
required. 

9 Contests of strength, endurance and skill between individuals 
are desirable. ■ •. 



52 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

10 The lowering of records is a distinctly laudable ambition, 
because of the bearing of individual accomplishment upon all con- 
cerned, but the highest consideration is the growth of physical pro- 
ficiency in the multitude. 

ii Team contests have a more distinctly invigorating influence 
upon students and upon the common thought of the country than 
individual contests, but they are encompassed with corrupting ten- 
dencies which demand the alert oversight and more decisive pro- 
tection of competent authority. 

12 Students are to manage student contests, but only when 
the management is thoroughly compatible with the ideals of the 
institutions represented. There is no school freedom not consistent 
with the ends for which schools stand. 

13 An institution dishonors itself when it permits one not a 
regular and genuine student to represent it. 

14 Any physical work or contest incompatible with regular 
student work bears heavily upon a few and discredits all of the 
serious work of an institution. 

15 A system of coaching which cares nothing for the man who 
is a factor in a game, which stops at no method, which cares only 
for success and for the prestige of a professional coach, and which 
is not representative of the honor of an institution, is vicious and 
intolerable. 

16 A contest between educational institutions must be free from 
features which make for profligacy or corruption. 

17 The use of athletics to advertise an institution is repre- 
hensible. 

18 No sport can stand for an institution which, by reason of 
the large gate fees, bars out (or ought to) a large percentage of 
the constituency of the institution who want to be present at its 
contests. 

19 The friends of college sport will have to fight for its integ- 
rity, and the more inspiring it is the more the barnacles of society 
will seize upon it and the more true manliness ought to contend 
for it. 

20 Physical exercise and open-air play are very great factors in 
the development of men and in the evolution of the social health of 
a people. Educational administration should make use of them, 
and should be held responsible for keeping them clean and making 
the most of them. In the athletics of the school system as in every- 
thing else associated with the schools, the government of the schools 
is bound to govern. 



PHYSICAL TRAINING AND ATHLETICS IN THE SCHOOLS 53 

These seem like commonplaces and platitudes. It is hoped they 
are. If they are, there is no dissent. But it is rather obvious that 
some of them may claim a fuller measure of enforcement. 

I have discussed the physical training and athletics for boys. I 
am quite aware that there are phases of the question which concern 
the girls. I have been glad to find very ample and grateful refuge 
in the fact that the next address is likely to deal with them, for it 
will be by the president of one of the time-honored woman's col- 
leges of the country. 

This is no mean subject. It goes to the decline of physical vitality 
in the cities, and would postpone the death penalty which nature 
imposes upon people who are useless. It not only bears upon the 
character of the educational system and exemplifies the conscience 
of the nation, but it goes to the making of character and conscience 
in school and nation. The plays and sports of a people, when 
guided by conscience, make for toleration and forbearance; for 
strength which makes littleness and petulance unseemly; for world 
relations which are self-conscious and direct; and for an effectiveness 
on occasion which uplifts free institutions in the eyes of all man- 
kind. Life in the open gave us Lexington and Concord and Bunker 
Hill, and life in the open must make good the assurance that " there 
thev will remain forever." 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 

AN ADDRESS AT THE JOINT MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATED ACADEMIC 
PRINCIPALS, THE COUNCIL OF GRAMMAR SCHOOL PRINCIPALS, 
THE SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, THE TRAINING 
TEACHERS CONFERENCE, AND THE DRAWING TEACH- 
ERS CLUB OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK AT 
SYRACUSE N. Y. ON DEC. 28, I9O4 

Mr President and Ladies and Gentlemen: Thanking you, Mr 
President, for your too generous words, and you, my friends, for 
your cordial welcome, I tender, you my sincere acknowledgments 
and add my Christmas greetings and my congratulations upon the 
reassuring outlook of the opening year. The attendance at these 
different and flourishing associations of New York teachers, com- 
bined with the experience in other states, seems to prove that the 
holiday week is the natural time of the year for large meetings of 
teachers. In about all but the name these meetings form the coun- 
terpart of the great state associations which will meet at the capitols 
of all of the western states in this Christmas vacation and which will 
leave a lasting impression upon the educational work of half of the 
country. It is very desirable to make a show of numbers. We each 
feel a little prouder and a little stronger when we have a part in 
these large gatherings, which always leave definite impressions upon 
the people. 

The time of the year, the business that brings us into association, 
the public expectations that encompass us, and the general confidence 
and prevailing hopefulness of the situation are all heartening. 

It is the Christmas season. How much that means in human life ! 
It turns thought to the stars : it begets the effort of souls to chime 
with the music of the spheres. In celebration of the most stupendous 
event in either religious or secular history, the busy world stops at 
this point in the " circle of the golden year " and blesses itself with 
songs of thanksgiving and gifts of love. 

The work of the schools accords with the spirit of the Christmas 
week. Work gives trend and tone to the lives of workers. Our work 
gives added warmth to the inevitable good fellowship of an holiday 
assemblage and gathers truer impulses and nobler inspirations from 
the generous and joyous atmosphere of the Christmas celebration. 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 55 

But there are some sobering elements which must enter into our 
deliberations. We represent a people and look to a future. It is a 
great people and a long and an all important future. No other peo- 
ple have such gigantic and unlike factors of population. There are 
700,000 Yiddish-speaking people in the heart of the city of New 
York. We recognize the fact and reckon with it. No other Ameri- 
can state has been so uniformly courageous in assuming the burdens 
of popular education and in placing them upon the resources which 
ought to bear them ; no other state has a better appreciation of present 
exigencies, and no other is more determined to maintain an educa- 
tional system which shall meet the future needs completely. The 
face of the Empire State was never to the rising sun more squarely 
than now. With an hundred millions for the canal, education must 
surely have the money that it needs. New York will continue to 
hold the gateway to the " long house " and her men and women will 
continue to do things. Of all the things to be done, popular educa- 
tion must have the first and best attention and whatever support 
it needs. It is not more a matter of money than of plan and method ; 
not more a matter of legislation than of the spirit of men and women ; 
not more a matter of theory than of intelligent appreciation of con- 
ditions and of patriotic and cheerful fellowship. It makes the touch 
of elbows more agreeable and comradeship of more moment in these 
holiday associations of New York teachers. 

But happily the outlook of this particular year is full of promise. 
The state is in the aggressive mood. The educational forces are 
united. We must differ in judgment upon details, but we will come 
to conclusions -through discussion. Mere influence or mere volu- 
bility or mere anger or mere selfishness will not count. We will 
come to understandings and then we will put our forces together in 
executing them. Until we are reasonably agreed upon any im- 
portant move, we will hold it in abeyance. When we are reason- 
ably agreed upon a policy we will put it through. The way is open. 
We have had the educational convulsion of our generation. A long 
road stretches before us. We will travel it together, — city schools 
and country schools, public schools and private schools, elementary 
schools and secondary schools, and colleges and universities and 
professional schools and special schools for the unfortunates, and 
libraries and study clubs and museums, and all of the instrumentali- 
ties for uniformly diffusing knowedge, for extending and enlarging 
popular enlightenment, for raising the level of a people's intel- 
lectual life — we will all fall into the system and go along in com- 
pany. And whatever we do shall be made to conform to peda- 



56 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

gogic principles as we understand them, to the best interests of all 
of eight millions of people, to the expectation that we are to have 
an educational revival from Oyster Bay to Dunkirk, and to all the 
exigencies of the rather serious task of perfecting a sane and bal- 
anced educational system which shall be equal to the support of 
free institutions and not a whit behind that of any other state in 
the Union or of any other people in the world. 

This is a good resolution for this Christmas meeting. If there 
are any who refuse to take it we are sorry. One is happier in 
marching with a procession than in sitting by the roadside and 
seeing it go by. If there is one who would turn back from the 
splendid sunlight of a resurrection to the leaden skies and the 
quaking earth of a crucifixion morning, it is time for proceedings 
de lunatico inquiriendo. By far the greater part of us are going 
on with this state. We are going to aid in maintaining its primacy 
and we are going to make its. destiny as great as we can. We are 
going with a great throng who will do things, and we are going to 
have part in the doing. We want every one, of whatever clan or 
party, to go with us in promoting interests which are common to 
us all. And whether each one of us shall be able to do little or 
much, we guarantee that the very effort will bear the assurance of 
a gladsome New Year to all who will strive to have a share in the 
work of the world. 

The secondary schools 

All that I have said is, of course, a prelude. I have set for 
myself tonight the task of discussing our system of secondary 
schools. I expect to speak of the history of these schools but not 
to present anything like a history of them. I shall treat of the 
thought that has brought them to their present state but shall lay 
no claim to capability for a philosophical examination of their 
organization, their work, or their relations. In due time Doctor 
Edward J. Goodwin, the Second Assistant Commissioner, who is 
in immediate charge of this field, out of wide reading, deep thinking 
and ample experience, will do all that. I expect to present some 
observations concerning the future of these schools and their rela- 
tions to the educational system and the people, but upon the distinct 
understanding that any suggestion of mine concerning policies not 
yet concluded is made to my associates in the teaching force rather 
than to the Legislature and is subject to revision in the light of a 
wider and more illuminating discussion. 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 57 

There are 145 registered academies .and 655 registered high 
schools, or exactly 800 approved secondary schools in the Univer- 
sity of the State of New York. The figures stir recollections and 
investigations and exemplify an advance both remarkable and re- 
splendent. 

It is not for me to say that this system has reached anything 
like its best form, nor to think that it is yet doing anything like 
the work we may well expect, but when I read this paragraph from 
perhaps the best piece of educational history published in the last 
year by one of the first half dozen professors of education in Ameri- 
can universities, I gain confidence that the system is not so very bad. 
Professor Brown of the University of California, in The Making of 
the Middle Schools, says : 

If the University of the State of New York had a rather vague 
existence in the earlier days, there has been no doubt of its place 
among the actualities in more recent times. The spirit of organ- 
ized activity has been at work in the institution, with all the stirring, 
straining, and collision of diverse purposes which commonly attend 
that spirit's operation. The strongly centralized administration 
which this unique establishment embodies has been railed at and 
glorified, but it has gone on organizing, and organizing still more, 
until it has become a force to be reckoned with in the making of 
our higher grades of instruction. It can hardlv be doubted that 
this university now presents the most thoroughly organized state 
system of secondary education which has yet been developed on 
American soil. 

That is competent opinion from the outside. The courts would 
say that before that could be cast aside it would have to be distin- 
guished rather closely. If competent in any court, it ought to be 
convincing in a New York tribunal. 

But let us look at the process of evolution. There have been 
three fairly well defined steps in the making of American secondary 
schools. First there was the Latin grammar school of the colonies. 
Second came the academy, which prevailed and flourished from the 
Revolutionary War till past the middle of the -nineteenth century. 
And third the public high school which has come into its estate in 
the last half century. 



The colonial grammar school 

The colonial grammar school took its name and its character from 
the early cathedral grammar schools and the monasteries. There 



58 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

were not many of them and they were for the greater part both 
local and temporary. They were in almost every instance fitting 
schools for the colleges. They did not scatter their affections. 
Each one was the instrument and feeder of a particular college. 
They prepared pupils for the college entrance examinations, but 
they had to go far to supplement the meager instruction received 
in the home schools, or perhaps oftener in the homes where there 
were no schools at all. Of course they observed and inculcated the 
religious beliefs of the colleges which they supported. 

The character of the New England grammar schools at the 
middle of the 17th century will be seen from the statement that 
" When scholars had so profited at the grammar schools that they 
could read any classical author into English and readily make and 
speak true Latin, and write it in verse as well as in prose, and 
perfectly decline the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek 
tongues, they were judged capable of admission in Harvard College." 

At Princeton, a century later, " Candidates must be capable of 
composing grammatical Latin, translating Virgil, Cicero's Ora- 
tions and the four evangelists in Greek, and must understand the 
principal rules of vulgar arithmetic," and this controlled the work 
of such grammar schools as there were at that time in the Middle 
Colonies. 

These schools are commonly called " free schools," but they were 
not wholly free. They claimed tuition fees, depended upon generous 
gifts which they often secured, and looked to permanent endow- 
ments which some of them realized. Often gifts of lands or some 
special revenues were made by the town. Certainly they were not 
public in the sense that they were supported by uniform taxation. 
The term " free school " seems to have been used to designate 
schools not restricted to a particular class of pupils. 

New England led in the formation of these early classical schools 
because New England was New England. Institutions in New 
England naturally enough copied institutional life in Old England. 
The English peasantry had no schools. The English nobility and 
aristocracy maintained colleges and fitting schools for their own. 
The grammar schools like the colleges of which they were really 
a part came from the higher classes and were necessarily exclusive. 
There was a fine aristocracy, indeed a gifted and, speaking rela- 
tively, a learned aristocracy in New England and naturally enough 
it followed the ways of the mother country. Often it improved 
upon those ways. The growing spirit of democracy made this par- 
ticularly true in education. 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 59 

The Dutch were the first to set up the really free elementary 
school in America. They brought more democracy with them than 
the Puritans did. The Pilgrims had more of it, man for man, than 
either; but there were not enough of them to bring a very great 
quantity or propagate it very rapidly. Before the English over- 
threw the Dutch there were many elementary schools in New Neth- 
erland. There were only one or two grammar or classical schools. 
After the English triumphed alj of the Dutch schools disappeared. 
Education was a bone of contention. The English had no disposi- 
tion to encourage elementary schools for Dutchmen. It seemed 
perilous to them. In the more than a century from the English 
invasion to the Revolution there were two and only two schools 
established by the Dutch with the English official approval. Both 
were grammar schools. The English crown could tolerate Dutch 
classical schools rather than Dutch elementary schools. That much 
seemed reasonably safe when the teachers had to be approved by 
English bishops. One of these schools was as transitory as classical ; 
the other was splendidly persistent for it merged into Columbia 
University. 

Rise of the academies 

There is nothing more interesting in our history, or in any his- 
tory, than the relation of the democratic to the educational advance. 
The growth of sentiment and feeling which forced the Revolution 
was quickly reflected in innovations upon the character of the schools. 
The Colonial grammar schools were pushed down into' unoccupied 
territory from the exclusive institutions of such aristocracy as there 
was. They were the instruments of a distinct copartnership be- 
tween church and state. They were commoner and stronger where 
that "copartnership was the widest and the most exact. They were 
few and weak where that relation was nonexistent or ineffective. 
But of course until real democracy began to assert itself there were 
no schools save the exclusive ones provided by the crown and 
church. With the approach of the Revolution and resulting from 
the same causes new social, ecclesiastical and political conditions 
produced a new order of schools. The tendency toward the inde- 
pendence of governmental and ecclesiastical affairs was developing 
and the close relation between church and state which so long 
obtained in the Puritan theocracy was weakening. The effect upon 
the schools was twofold, — to make the lower grades of schools the 
instruments of the democratic advance and to stimulate private and 



60 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

denominational effort in the interest of the old order. The results 
were the common elementary school, developed more slowly than we 
are accustomed to think, and also a new institution of much higher 
grade under private and denominational control, with more exact 
legal and corporate organization and powers, and not entirely with- 
out state largess. The grammar schools did not wholly disappear, 
but they rapidly decreased in numbers ; and such as lived contracted 
their curriculums, and shed their denominational bent. A very few, 
notably the Boston Latin School, have been adopted by the public 
and have come down to the present day, retaining a distinct classical 
curriculum. Wherever this has occurred it has been in close asso- 
ciation with other secondary schools with wider courses an'd freer 
electives. 

Even before the Revolution an academy appeared here and there: 
but it needed Independence to settle matters. And Independence 
did settle matters. We too often forget that there were two Eng- 
lish parties on the other side in the American Revolution. The 
Puritan party was not a democratic institution, but it was being 
trained to more liberal and independent thinking, and was coming 
to see the need or at least the inevitable advance of democratic 
institutions. The English in America who had not yet become full- 
fledged Americans were Puritans. They had no deep affection for 
the Cavaliers or the Royal Cabal at London and their political and 
religious faith and their pioneer life made them the best fighters 
the world ever saw. Real separation made complete independents 
and pretty fair democrats of them all. They were a little slow 
and needed time, but time made them about the best Americans in 
the lot. They joined the issue and got up splendid little scrim- 
mages at Lexington and Concord. They did some awful fighting 
at Bunker Hill, but lost the hill. They were not without humor, 
grim as it was, when they told the British commander they would 
like to sell him some more hills at. the same cost. But the military 
power of the Cavalier political cabal for the time being in the con- 
trol of the English government was outwitted on Long Island and 
pretty largely absorbed at Saratoga. It is interesting to hear Sir 
George Trevelyan, a good enough English authority, in the best 
and most judicial history of the Revolutionary struggle which has 
been written, tell us that we were then fighting the English govern- 
ment in order to keep and enlarge English liberty. Whether or 
not it would have otherwise been lost, as a matter of fact we did 
keep it and enlarge it. Under rather bad treatment after the war, 
which we all regret now, the Royalists either came to be Americans 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 6l 

or went back to England or over to Canada and left a pure democ- 
racy to begin to break out new roads and go ahead as fast as it 
would. 

The elimination of the influence of English politics from the 
affairs of government in America, the removal of the oversight of 
the English church over religious affairs in this country, and par- 
ticularly the distinct enunciation of the entire separation of state 
and church in the scheme of government which rose above the fires 
of the Revolution gave decisive impulse to new educational ideas 
and distinct form and energy to a new manner of school. 

The American academy was not a democratic institution but 
it was more democratic than the colleges and Latin schools which 
antedated it. It was as democratic as the hold-over influences or 
the uncertain political theories of the time would permit it to be. 
It had an independent legal organization with an independent though 
perhaps a slender endowment and a self-perpetuating control. If 
it aimed to prepare pupils for college it undertook even more to 
prepare pupils for life when they were not going to college. Often 
its work was wider than that of the college itself. It laid new 
stress on the study of English, including its grammar, rhetoric and 
the art of public speaking. It went more broadly into mathematics, 
including surveying and navigation and it made important begin- 
nings in the natural sciences. Chemistry and physics were favorite 
subjects. History was universally taught. Even architecture and 
stenography got a start. French was very common and German 
appears occasionally. If Latin and Greek continued to be upheld 
they were paralleled by innumerable courses which were clearly 
enough of democratic origin and must surely change the outlook 
of communities and propagate the democratic principle in affairs. 
It was attached to the fortunes of no party in politics, and although 
it was devoutly religious in spirit, it of necessity came to serve a 
constituency which was much broader than the membership of any 
single church. It exacted fees, but commonly far below the meas- 
ure of its necessities, and its democratic tendencies disposed it to 
help all it could. It surely needed the aid which the state was 
disposed to give and as the state was a democratic one the fact 
stimulated the democracy of the academy itself. 

The New York academies 

By the act of Ap. 13, 1787, the Board of Regents of the Univer- 
sity of the State of New York was given the power to charter 



62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

academies. At the first subsequent meeting Erasmus Hall Acad- 
emy, now Erasmus Hall High School of Brooklyn, was chartered. 
At the next meeting Clinton Academy at East Hampton in Suffolk 
county was chartered. In 1794 there were 12 of these academies, 
in 1809 there were 30, in 1829, 48, and in 1834, 64. 

It has been the policy of New York, practically from the begin- 
ning to give aid and encouragement to secondary education. When 
the elementary school system was developed the state undertook to 
assure a primary school education to every citizen. It would not sup- 
port it but has always compelled every district to maintain an elemen- 
tary school and has made the stronger districts aid the weaker ones. 
It has never gone so far as to assure a secondary school to every 
community by requiring towns or districts to maintain them, but 
it has gone far to induce communities to establish them by giving 
substantial aid to such as were established. 

In 1790 the state established what is known as the literature fund 
by authorizing the Regents to take possession of certain state lands 
and apply the rents and profits to aid colleges and academies. In 
1 81 3 and again in 1819 the income of funds received from other 
state lands were added to the literature fund and in 1827 securities 
to the value of $150,000 belonging to the canal fund were added 
to it. Subsequent legislation transferred annually $28,000 from 
the United States deposit fund to the literature fund. 

For convenient reference and because always interesting I insert 
here a table showing the distribution of the literature fund to 
academies in the years 1820, 1830, 1840 and i860, which will indi- 
cate the number of schools, the whole number of pupils, the number 
of academic pupils, the sums apportioned, and the average amount 
to each academy. It is as follows : 



Number of schools 
Number of scholars 
Number of academic scholars 
Amount apportioned 
Average amount to each 

To indicate the location and strength of the academies I insert a 
table giving the names of the academies, the amount distributed to 
each from the literature fund, and the number of pupils in each 
institution, by Senate districts in the year 1834, just seventy years 
ago. 



1820 


1830 


1840 


i860 


30 


58 


Il8 


160 


2 2l8 


4 303 


IO 88l 


28941 


636 


2 222 


884I 


16 514 


$2 500 


$IO OOO 


$40 OOO 


$40000 


$83 


$172 


$339 


$259 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 



63 



FIRST SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Clinton, Easthampton 

Erasmus Hall, Flatbush 

Institution for Deaf and Dumb, New York 

Oyster Bay, Oyster Bay 

Union Hall, Jamaica 



No. of 

students 

46 

95 

137 

48 

96 



422 



Am't from 

literature 

fund 

$ 96 65 
280 70 

630 35 
179 40 
312 90 

$1 500 . . 



SECOND SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Delaware, Delhi 
Dutchess, Poughkeepsie 
Farmers Hall, Goshen 
Kingston, Kingston 
Montgomery, Montgomery 
Mt Pleasant, Mt Pleasant 
Newburgh, Newburgh 
North Salem, North Salem 
Redhook, Redhook 



48 


$ 43 54 


114 


309 65 


34 


87 08 


60 


in 27 


63 


212 91 


147 


246 97 


72 


309 65 


35 


72 57 


36 


106 36 



609 



$1500 



THIRD SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Albany, Albany 


226 


$278 80 


Albany Female, Albany 


3i8 


470 08 


Albany Female Seminary, Albany 


150 


197 45 


Hudson, Hudson 


61 


132 30 


Jefferson, Jefferson 


50 


42 80 


Kinderhook, Kinderhook 


75 


140 41 


Lansingburg, Lansingburg 


21 


34 66 


Schenectady, Schenectady 


182 


203 50 



1083 



$1500 



6 4 



NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 



FOURTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Names 

Cambridge, Cambridge 
Canajoharie, Canajoharie 
Franklin, Malone 
Gouverneur, Gouverneur 
Granville, North Granville 
Johnstown, Johnstown 
Plattsburg, Plattsburg 
St Lawrence, Potsdam 
Washington, Salem 





Am't from 


No. of 


literature 


students 


fund 


41 


$ 98 51 


57 


197 02 


45 


147 77 


57 


205 95 


61 


80 60 


49 


80 60 


42 


in 93 


98 


291 05 


67 


286 97 



487 



$1 500 



FIFTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Bridgewater, Bridgewater 

Clinton Grammar School, Clinton 

Fairfield, Fairfield 

Hamilton, Hamilton 

Lowville, Lowville 

Oneida Institute, Whitesboro 

Rensselaer, Oswego, Mexico 

Sem'y of O. and G. Conference, Cazenovia 

Union, Belleville 

Utica, Utica 

Whitesboro, Whitesboro 



52 


$ 56 52 


25 


31 10 


77 


118 50 


83 


198 65 


7i 


69 26 


82 


198 48 


47 


105 73 


263 


319 .. 


50 


83 85 


120 


195 06 


85 


I2 3 95 



946 



$1500 



SIXTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Cherry Valley, Cherry Valley 


69 


$207 20 


Cortland, Homer 


146 


55i o5 


Franklin, Prattsburg 


44 


182 33 


Hartwick, Hartwick 


37 


145 03 


Ithaca, Ithaca 


48 


53 87 


Oxford, Oxford 


82 


227 92 


Owego, Owego 


89 


132 60 



515 



$1500 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 65 

SEVENTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Names 


No. of 
students 


Am't from 

• literature 

fund 


Auburn, Auburn 


85 


$209 55 


Canandaigua, Canandaigua 


125 


i99 55 


Cayuga, Aurora 


39 


119 71 


Onondaga, Onondaga Valley 


40 


56 52 


Ontario Female Seminary, Canandaigua 


127 


289 25 


Ovid, Ovid 


88 


113 08 


Palmyra, Palmyra 


99 


269 45 


Pompey, Pompey 


28 


36 58 


Yates county, Penn Yan 


150 


206 21 



781 $1 500 . . 

EIGHTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT 



Fredonia, Fredonia 
Lewiston, Lewiston 
Livingston county, Genesee 
Middlebury, Middlebury 
Rochester, Rochester 
Springville, Springville 



81 


$279 62 


57 


204 02 


37 


75 60 


107 


241 82 


160 


5i3 78 


45 


185 16 



487 $1 500 . 



The whole number of students reported in academies in 1834 was 
5330 and the number allowed by Regents in the distribution of the 
literature fund, as having pursued the requisite studies was 3741 ; 
the value of academy lots and buildings was $390,825 ; value of 
other real estate $19,722 ; the value of philosophical apparatus and 
library, $21,795; the value of other personal estate, $139,130; num- 
ber of books in libraries, 10,145; tuition money for the year $73,472; 
income from permanent funds, $9275, amount received from the 
state, $12,000; debts due by academies, $72,137; number of- teach- 
ers, 217; compensation of teachers, $68,924. 

A study of the subject makes it clear that the Regents were dis- 
criminating in granting charters. They required satisfactory proof 
that the institution had sufficient means to support life and perform 
its work creditably and they saw to it that it was not likely to 
flourish at the expense of a previously incorporated institution. 
This led to applications to the Legislature which were often granted 
with less care. Between 1819 and 1830 there were more than 40 



66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

academic charters granted by the Legislature mostly without con- 
ditions. Upon the whole however it may be said that the academies 
of the state had an excellent and in many instances even an illus- 
trious history. 

But in time these splendid institutions were forced to give way 
to another class of institutions more democratic than themselves. 
About 375 academies were incorporated between 1787 and 1884. 
By 1884 very nearly 50 had been merged in union schools or had 
become separate high schools ; four or five had been resolved into 
state normal schools, three or four had served as college foundations 
and about 250 had become extinct. A few after being chartered 
were never organized. There are now about 30 of the old time 
private or denominational incorporated academies still in existence. 
During the last '20 years there have however come under the visita- 
tion and inspection of the Regents a large number of modern de- 
nominational schools of academic grade which more than makes 
good the number of academies reporting in 1884. But the public 
high schools have come to far outnumber them. 

The high school movement 

The academies were the outcome of the best thinking of almost 
a century of American progress. They were the embodiment of as 
fine heroisms as ever found expression in any educational institu- 
tion and there have been no finer in the world. They were as demo- 
cratic as the most aggressive democratic spirit of their day could 
make them. They did a work entitling them to enduring gratitude 
because of wide and permanent value. Then as a prevailing class 
they were forced aside by a new class of institutions which sprang 
out of fresh and advancing thought, were more democratic, met a 
wholesome and imperative demand for a wider range of work, had 
a much wider and more potential influence, and gained new and very 
different ends. 

The academy was an incorporated and endowed institution, 
though commonly so slenderly endowed as to be transitory. The 
public high school is supported by taxation, managed by public 
officers and more independent and permanent. The high school is 
free ; the academy was as free as it could be, but it lived largely 
upon fees. The difference appeared in the pupils, in the instruction, 
in the outlook, and in the measure of stability. The interest of the 
mass is the best endowment an institution can have. It is even more 
steadfast than statutes. The taxing power is not so spasmodic as 
beneficence. 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 6"/ 

The work of the academy connected with the colleges and had 
no organic connections below ; that of the high school connects with 
the public elementary schools below and forces the colleges after 
long centuries of opposing theories to establish relations with the 
upper end of their courses or waive the hope of preeminence. 

The academy was pushed down into unoccupied territory from 
above; the high school was pushed up into the same field from 
below. The business of one was to serve the interests that were 
above but not quite altogether heavenly; that of the other was to 
help on the broader and more worldly concerns that were below. 
In time it transpired that with all this in the same territory there 
was now and then some abrasion. 

The function of the academy was to prepare for college and inci- 
dentally for life ; that of the high school is to prepare for life and 
incidentally for college. The one was classical with some practi- 
calities; the other is severely practical, and generally in the best 
sense, with some classical appurtenances. The academy was essen- 
tially an advanced school for boys ; the high school is as essentially 
coeducational. 

The courses of the high schools have widened out from the old 
standbys and gone into about everything that can aid one to earn 
a living. There is mental discipline in study that informs the 
mind and applies to life. 

It is interesting to study the first decisive manifestations of this 
high school movement. They came in the West — in what was then 
the West — where there was nothing in the way, where democracy 
was freer than in thoroughly settled social conditions, and where 
the masses were doing things on their own account. The move- 
ment advanced on lines of least resistance, but when forced it 
accepted the gauge of battle, and when it did it won or drove a 
mutually advantageous compromise. 

The movement from the beginning and always has been strong in 
the West — in whatever came to be the West. A western village 
is ashamed to be without a high school. The building is the finest 
and the most conspicuous in the settlement. It is so in all of the 
North Central, the Mountain and the Pacific states. Of course it 
results in many struggling high schools, but in many more which are 
as fine as any in the land. And moreover they will abundantly take 
care of a splendid future. 

They will do that not so much because of what they are, but be- 
cause of their buoyant spirit and their universal popularity, because 
they are everywhere and grow steadily, and because of the relations 



68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

in which they stand. There are sixteen grades in the free school 
system in the great West. The continuity of the system from the 
beginning of the kindergarten to the graduate school in the state 
university is perfect and the road is open. Certificates of work done 
in the school below admit to the school above without examination. 
The inadequacy of a written examination as a test of the knowledge 
and the power of pupils when the examination is set by strangers 
who have had no immediate connection with previous work seems 
to me obvious. The acceptance of certificates helps pupils to go to 
the university who would not go. It stimulates and steadies all of 
the schools below. It articulates the whole educational system and 
gives each part intelligent interest and pride in all the other parts. 
It does not lower standards in the universities. The tests of univer- 
sity work are as severe and the degrees as exalted as anywhere in 
the country. Eastern universities try not to believe it but they will 
have to open their minds and modify their opinions. 

And a further word might be dropped by way of a not over ven- 
turesome prophecy. The old line universities which have come to 
be great, may of course continue indefinitely upon old line policies 
with only very slight modifications. But unless they go farther in 
accepting, not quietly or stealthily, but openly and avowedly, the 
credentials of high schools of unquestioned standing, unless every 
one who has in himself the reasonable possibilities of doing their 
work has his free chance, unless they guard against letting snippery 
and second-hand culture give tone to their character and flavor to 
their doings there will be free public universities in some of these 
Eastern states before all of us die. 

The demand of our democracy for free education to the very 
limits of human knowledge is aggressive. It has grown more aggres- 
sive through the success of the public high school movement, and as 
a result of the influence of high school graduates upon the sentiment 
of the country. It is going through the land. It is a demand which 
will have to be treated politely and negotiated with or there will be 
another issue, which ought to be avoided, between public and private 
institutions. 

The figures concerning the high school movement are as interest- 
ing as any figures are likely to be. Commissioner Harris tells us that 
at the turning point of the last century there were but 1 1 high schools 
with progressive courses continuing from two to four years and 
covering advanced studies in foreign languages, mathematics, litera- 
ture, natural science and history. In i860 there were 44 of these 
schools; in 1870, 160; in 1880, 800; in 1890, 2526; in 1900, 6005; 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 



69 



This remarkable growth has been decisive in every section of the 
country — the South by no means excepted, but it has at all times been 
specially noteworthy in the Mississippi Valley states. 

The New York high schools 

But the advance of the secondary schools in New York is of chief 
concern to us tonight. From the very beginning of statehood the 
bounty of the state has gone liberally to these schools ; and the return 
has approved the policy and justified the investment. 

What is known as the literature fund, as already stated, was estab- 
lished in aid of secondary education in 1790. The stream made a 
fine start and it has gathered volume in its progress. It is but just 
to say that no other state has anything like such a record. The state 
appropriation now for this purpose is $350,000 annually, which is 
apportioned on the basis of $100 to each teacher, not to exceed $250 
for approved books and apparatus provided the school supplies a 
like amount, and a proportionate share of the balance on the basis of 
attendance of academic students. 

The state appropriations from 1793 to 1904 were, according to my 
best information, $4,526,983.80. The total expenditures of the 
system has been $104,583,413. The following table will show the 
state aid and total expenditures for each of the last 35 years : 



Year 


State aid 


Total expenditures 


I869 


$ 44444 46 


$ 779 315 


187O 


43 755 54 


971 241 


I87I 


44 552 46 


I 075 7l6 


I872 


45 643 9 2 


1 059 394 


^73 


133 433 32 


987 151 


1874 


122962 36 


1 160845 


1875 


43000 .. 


1 157946 


1876 


43000 .. 


1 120 731 


1877 


43000 .. 


1 083 229 


1878 


44 424 37 


1 069 880 


1879 


43000 .. 


1 019 192 


1880 


43 000 . , 


1 013 780 


1881 


43000 .. 


1 020 586 


1882 


43000 .. 


1 146 451 


1883 


43000 .. 


1 235 016 



JO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 



Year 


State aid 


Total expenditures 


I884 


46 OOO . . 


I 385 I20 


1885 


44 203 18 


I 323 566 


1886 


44852 23 


I 338 O48 


1887 


I05 535 22 


I 383 609 


1888 


IO5803 98 


I 645 961 


1889 


IO7 215 56 


I 936 84I 


189O 


107 559 77 


2 341 956 


189I 


99034 17 


2 484 295 


1892 


105 796 53 


2 760 399 


1893 


105 824 48 


2 84O 282 


1894 


96853 94 


3 304 703 


1895 


116549 19 


3.133 218 


1896 


211 989 13 


3 560 802 


1897 


in 684 37 


3 284 246 . 


1898 


197923 78 


3 729 913 


1899 


205031 56 


5 226 825 


I90O 


2 49 35i 9° 


6 096 375 


I9OI 


292 311 91 


5 702 718 


1902 


309539 14 


6 627 708 


I9O3 


304 126 43 


7 107000 


I9O4 


312358 29 


8 1 1 1 369 




$4 092 761 19 


$91 225 427 



In 1822 the Legislature passed an act making the trustees of 
Farmer's Hall Academy in the village of Goshen, Orange county, 
trustees of the common school district when a majority of the tax- 
able inhabitants of the district, should give their consent thereto. 
An act similar in all respects was passed in 1823 concerning the 
academy and the common school district at Oyster Bay in Suffolk 
county. Here was the nucleus of the union school movement. 

The first use, certainly the first legal use, of the term " high 
school " in this state seems to have grown out of the combined, or 
larger, or the little more advanced school of the Lancasterian move- 
ment. In 1825 an act was passed by the Legislature incorporating 
the " High School Society of the City of New York " and in the 
next ten years a dozen other similar acts were passed. Governor 
DeWitt Clinton gave that movement and this legislation his warmest 
support. While the institutions here provided for were far from 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 7 1 

public high schools as we use the term they were quite clearly the 
first fruits of the public high school movement. And the charters of 
at least two or three of these institutions contained the first dis- 
tinctly recognizable factors of the public high school for they con- 
solidated school districts, they associated academies and elementary 
schools together under public management, and they combined clas- 
sical instruction with instruction in the useful arts. 

The act of 1853 contemplated such schools everywhere and for the 
election of boards of education for their management. These union 
schools were authorized when there was an academy in their district 
to make the same the academic department of the union schools 
upon the consent of the board of trustees of the academy. Thus the 
process of elimination and absorption went on, and the union schools 
with the resulting academic departments, and then the independently 
organized high schools, came to possess the land. - 

The present number of academies is as follows : 

Academies (incorporated) 102 

Senior academic schools 3 

Middle " 12 

Junior 25 

Special 3 

145 
Of high schools 

High schools 407 

Senior high schools 56 

Middle " 60 

Junior 128 

Special 4 

In the state, during the decade 1890-1900, while the growth in 
enrolment in the common schools was 16%, the number of public 
secondary schools increased 140% ; the number of academies (in- 
cluding denominational schools) 34% ; the total net property of 
secondary schools and the number of secondary students more than 
100%. In 1903, secondary schools reported 95,096 students and a 
total net property of $33,771,006.27, with expenditures for the year 
of $7,106,999.90, as follows: high school property, $14,400,278.45; 
high school expenditures, $5,007,055.02; academic property, $19,- 
370,727.82; academy expenditures, $2,099,944.88. 



72 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

New York and other states 

We would like to know where we are in comparison with other 
states. The United States Bureau of Education gives us the follow- 
ing figures : 

The population of the United States is estimated at 10.43 times 
that of New York. The number of secondary schools in the United 
States is 14.54 times the number in New York. 

The population of New York is 2.57 times that of Massachusetts 
while the number of secondary schools in New York is but 1.72 
times the number in Massachusetts. 

The population of New York is 2.93 times the population of 
Indiana while the number of secondary schools in New York is only 
1.09 times the number in Indiana. 

The population of New York is 4.9 times the population of Cali- 
fornia but the number of secondary schools in New York is but 3.05 
times the number in California. 

Turning from the number of schools to the number of pupils we 
find that whereas the population of the United States was 10.43 
times the population of New York, the secondary school pupils in 
the United States was but 8.33 times the number in New York. 

The population of New York is 2.57 times that of Massachusetts 
and the number of secondary school pupils in New York is but 1.78 
times the number in Massachusetts. 

The population of New York is 2.93 times that of Indiana but the 
number of secondary pupils in New York is 2.55 times the number 
in Indiana. 

The population of New York is 4.9 times the population of Cali- 
fornia and the number of pupils in New York secondary schools is 
4.05 times the number in California secondary schools. 

This shows that in the nation at large we have less than our pro- 
portion of secondary schools but more than our proportion of sec- 
ondary pupils. 

It shows that we have a less proportion of secondary schools and 
pupils than such states as Massachusetts, Indiana and California. 

Where is the explanation ? It must be admitted, and to her honor, 
that Massachusetts is exceptional in the number and character of 
secondary schools. And it is probable, and to her honor again, that 
she does better than many of the rest of us in making reports to 
the Bureau of Education. But why should states like Indiana and 
California have more secondary schools and pupils than New York? 

As already suggested the secondary school development has been 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 73 

exceptionally strong, as it was relatively very early, in all of the 
Western states but if they have really gone farther than we in getting 
up into the realm of advanced popular education we need to bestir 
ourselves. 

I think there is an ample and not a farfetched explanation. It is 
in the fact that the greatest city of the continent is within our borders. 
The data show that other states having a very large city in pro- 
portion to their populations are also below the average as to the 
number of secondary schools and pupils. Take for example Rhode 
Island, with the city of Providence, Maryland with Baltimore, and 
Illinois with Chicago. 

There are 176 times as many people, 250 times as many secondary 
schools and 156 times as many secondary pupils in the United 
States as in Rhode Island. 

There are 65 times as many people, 92 times as many secondary 
schools and 98 times as many secondary pupils in the United States 
as in Maryland. 

There are 15.6 times as many people in the United States, 19.7 
times as many secondary schools and 14.9 times as many secondary 
pupils as in Illinois. 

New York has 16.84 times the population of Rhode Island, 17.17 
times the number of secondary schools, and 18.71 times the number 
of secondary pupils. 

New York has 6.22 times the population of Maryland, 6.35 times 
the number of secondary schools, and 11.75 times the number of 
secondary pupils. 

New York has 1.49 times the population of Illinois, 1.35 times 
the number of secondary schools, and 1.79 times the number of 
secondary pupils. 

If the size of the cities and the bread question in congested popu- 
lations affects the attendance upon secondary schools as we know 
it must, then there is ample explanation of the New York figures. 
Cumulative explanation appears in the fact that until a very recent 
period in the older city of New York (Manhattan and the Bronx) 
there were no public high schools. Happily the omission is now 
being remedied by the upbuilding of a number which promise to be 
as large and as excellent as are to be found in the world. 

Incidentally, the secondary school attendance of the United States 
has doubled in thirteen years. In New York it has doubled in 
nine years. 

Comparing the statistics supplied in the state reports of New York 
and Massachusetts it appears that the number of secondary schools 



74 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

in New York in 1903 (780) was 1.9 times the number in 1893 (410) 
and that the number of secondary pupils in 1903 (95,096) was 2.3 
times the number in 1893 (41,799) while the number of secondary 
schools in Massachusetts in 1903 (311) was only .9 times the num- 
ber in 1893 (341) and the number of secondary pupils in Massachu- 
setts in 1903 (49,075) was 1.07 times the number in 1893 (45^94! )• 
In other words, the number of schools in Massachusetts by her own 
reports actually decreased in the decade and the number of pupils 
practically stood still, while in New York the number of schools 
practically doubled and the number of pupils considerably more than 
doubled notwithstanding that the ratio of increase in population was 
exactly the same in each state. And do not infer that I am lacking 
in respect for the work in Massachusetts. I am comparing with what 
has been believed to be the best secondary school state in the nation, 
unless it is our own, merely in order to do simple justice to a very 
great educational advance in the Empire State. 

But there is more to be said, and perhaps it goes more exactly 
to the point of our inquiry and will make clearer the course of true 
wisdom. 

Let us exclude the city of New York from the calculation and see 
where the rest of the state stands. By the last report of the Bureau 
of Education the number of secondary pupils to each 10,000 of 
population was in Massachusetts 16.25, in Connecticut it was 12.13, 
in Pennsylvania 7.91, in Ohio 13.31, in Indiana 12.90, in Iowa 
15.45, in Minnesota 9.85, in California 12.92; while in the state of 
New York outside of the greater city it was 14.4. And it must not 
be forgotten that there are many very considerable cities and one 
large city in the state outside of the city of New York which enter 
into this calculation. 

The distribution of secondary schools is very uniform throughout 
the state. The following table will show it by counties, and it will 
be observed that every county is represented. 

Location of New York secondary schools 

Counties Number of schools 

Albany 18 

Allegany 15 

Broome 9 

Cattaraugus 22 

Cayuga 10 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 75 

Counties Number of schools 

Chautauqua 20 

Chemung 6 

Chenango 13 

Clinton 9 

Columbia 8 

Cortland 6 

Delaware 10 

Dutchess 13 

Erie 29 

Essex 16 

Franklin . 10 

Fulton 5 

Genesee ■ 1 1 

Greene 8 

Hamilton 1 

Herkimer 12 

Jefferson 22 

Kings 13 

Lewis 7 

Livingston 10 

Madison 21 

Monroe 18 

Montgomery 8 

Nassau 15 

New York 19 

Niagara 9 

Oneida 25 

Onondaga 26 

Ontario 1 1 

Orange 21 

Orleans 6 

Oswego 14 

Otsego 19 

Putnam 6 

Queens 7 

Rensselaer 17 

Richmond 2 

Rockland 6 

St Lawrence 24 

Saratoga 1 1 



y6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Counties Number of schools 

Schenectady 2 

Schoharie 6 

Schuyler 3 



Seneca 



4 



Steuben 2 1 

Suffolk 24 

Sullivan 5 

Tioga 9 

Tompkins 9 

Ulster 8 

Warren 7 

Washington 13 

Wayne 13 

Westchester 27 

Wyoming 9 

Yates 5 



753 



Some institutions embraced in the University, but for some de- 
linquency on their part not receiving aid from the state in 1903, are 
included in the foregoing list. 

Beyond this the state has entered upon the policy of making an 
allotment to the high schools for the tuition of pupils who may 
come from districts without high schools in order to equalize the 
state largess for secondary education to all of the people,, and par- 
ticularly to make sure of aiding the more aggressive pupils in the 
less fortunate districts. The appropriation for this each year equals 
more than half of the entire sum which the state appropriates an- 
nually for the encouragement of secondary education. 

From this it is clear that neither the state government nor the 
people in their local communities have been indifferent or unin- 
telligent in the upbuilding of secondary schools. Taking the whole 
state together, in spite of the fact that the hindrances to the dif- 
fusion of higher education augment with the size and particularly 
with the congestion of population, New York justifies the splendid 
commendation of the author of The Making of the Middle Schools 
to which I alluded at the beginning. If the special drawbacks which 
present themselves in the metropolis were to be eliminated the pre- 
sentation would abundantly show not only the best organized system 
of secondary education developed on American soil as Professor 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM JJ 

Brown puts it, but it would show about as abundant and energetic 
and probably more evenly distributed provision for secondary in- 
struction as will be found anywhere in the land. 

I have felt warranted in pointing to the fact that the city of 
New York has somewhat vexed our educational statistics, but I 
must not omit to say that there is at the mouth of the Hudson the 
greatest problem in popular education and particularly in that of a 
secondary grade which appears in this country or in any country. 
We have only admiration for what that great city, and particularly its 
educational leaders, and more particularly still its great city super- 
intendent, are doing now. None of us would separate the statistics 
or sever the fellowship. We. remember the millions upon millions 
which the limitless wealth of that city has paid to promote popular 
education in all the rural districts and we expect that there will be 
millions more. There is something to give back. It is of quite as 
much value as the coin of the realm. It is encouragement and com- 
mendation ; it is educational experience and fellowship ; it is balance 
and steadying power which grows most abundantly among the 
grasses and in the woods ; and it is support in the much abused and 
often the unjustly abused Legislature, without which, in spite of all 
that is said about home rule, I am not sure but the city would be 
doomed. 

But before passing from the city of New York it ought to be dis- 
tinctly said that the rapidity of growth in the high schools located 
within the territory embraced by the boundaries of Greater New 
York since 1897 is altogether unprecedented in the history of educa- 
tion in this country. In 1897 the number of high school students 
was 2360, in 1904, 27,824 — an increase of 1079%. Within the same 
period the number of teachers increased from in to 841 or 658%; 
the annual expenditures from $161,084 to $2,922,648 an increase 
of T7i4% ; value of grounds, buildings and equipment from $637,- 
245 to $5,761,004 an increase of 804%. Nor is this all. There 
are, in addition, five high school buildings in process of erection, 
the aggregate contract price of which is above $3,000,000. 

The future 

Now let us turn our faces to the future. A careful inquiry, with 
no purpose but the ascertainment of the truth, seems to make it 
clear that the people of this state have not been remiss in setting 
up secondary schools ; that in the number of schools and of pupils 
we are above the average ; that the advance in numbers in the last 



78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

decade has been as remarkable as gratifying ; that with the exception 
of New York city these schools are evenly distributed over the terri- 
tory and are fairly representative of the population of the state and 
that in the city the evolution is now going forward as heroically 
and splendidly as it ever did anywhere. This is not saying that 
there is not room for more, or that what we have are not to be made 
stronger. We are to ascertain what will accomplish both of these 
ends. 

We have been speaking of numbers rather than of excellence. 
There is no reason known to me for imputations upon the character 
of these schools. I should be surprised to learn, after all that has 
been said or done, of any proof that the average of buildings, of 
equipment, of teaching power and of work accomplished was not 
high. Yet I have seen enough of school work to know that it 
often happens that people who have very indifferent schools think 
that they have the very best because no one does them the service 
of telling them the truth. It would not be surprising if there are 
many schools registered for but a part of the high school course 
which make the serious mistake of being more ambitious for a high 
sounding name and for appearing to do a lot of work rather than 
for occupying a minor place which is just as honorable if they will 
do what they may do just as well as it can be done. A school which 
is giving a 48 count diploma in less than four years and with indiffer- 
ent facilities should not be allowed to think that it is doing it as 
well as it may be done. There is nothing to be said against and 
there is much to be said for starting schools before they are able to 
do four full years work, but there is everything to be said against 
a fifty cent piece having the effrontery to try to pass itself off for a 
dollar. There is a field here that can not be tilled by people who are 
but half informed about the best there is in high school work, or by 
people who are self-conceited, who lack courage, or whose most 
substantial gift is mere politeness. It costs me nothing to admit 
that the strictly technical and professional phases of this great sub- 
ject lie outside of the field in which I can personally work to the 
best advantage, but I expect to sustain the experienced, surefooted 
and aggressive men and women who have that work in hand and 
to reinforce their number as far as law and opportunity will let me 
with the best that can be found in any part of the country. 

It is far from well that schools should have more courses than 
capacity to do the work completely. It is infinitely better to do less 
and do it as well as it can be done. It seems idle to offer six month 
courses when the results must be so superficial that if the pupil goes 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 79 

to a college of standing he must be told that before he can make a 
fair start he must get out of his head what has been put in it, and if 
he does not go to college he is likely to be hopelessly misled about 
his knowledge of the subject for all time. 

Much would be accomplished if a movement to standardize the 
work of the secondary schools in all parts of this state, which is 
now under serious discussion, could be successful. And if that 
could be identified with the standard for admission to college estab- 
lished by the College Entrance Examination Board of the Middle 
States and Maryland the need of state universities in the Eastern 
States will be less urgent and logical than it otherwise will be, while 
the advantages to the colleges will be very considerable and the 
placing of more exact values upon the work of all secondary schools 
will be more stimulating and steadying than we can now foresee. 

Nothing has been said tonight about the system of examinations 
which has had much to do with the tone and flavor of our secondary 
schools. There is ground enough for saying that standing where 
we did a generation ago, between the New England states where 
secondary schools grew naturally out of conditions fixed by historic 
causes and the West which was bound to have everything that was 
new, it was practically necessary that something should be found 
to stimulate local interest and enlarge state appropriations for the 
evolution of academic schools. It was found by my early instructor 
and life-long friend, Doctor David Murray, for many years Secre- 
tary of the Board of Regents, in the System of Regents examina- 
tions. It was a good and potential move. There are no reflections 
to be passed upon anything that has been done in connection with 
it now. But while a system which has been long in the growing 
is not to be ruthlessly disrupted we are not bound to leave our 
sandals at the door when we meet to talk about it. Some of us 
who are in a way responsible to the future are bound to speak about 
many details of it very often and there is reason for thinking that 
the new conditions which will surely open to an educational sys- 
tem which keeps marching will force many thorough and discrimi- 
nating discussions of it in the ensuing years. Let us have them 
without apprehension and without acrimony, with knowledge that 
temperate but truthful discussion is the life current of educational 
progress. 

In the meantime one thing is entirely clear, and that is that when 
a scheme of examinations is practically decisive of the quality and 
of the course of a system of schools, that scheme in all of its 
branches, in all of its vital parts is bound to be not in second class 



80 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

or seventh class, but in educational hands of the very first class train- 
ing, experience and rank. 

Massachusetts makes, as she has always made, secondary schools 
compulsory by statute, though I am unaware how far the statute 
has been executed against a reluctant community. Not until recent 
years has the state appropriated state funds for the support of these 
schools. New York has required an elementary school of at least 
reasonable character within reach of every home. It has tried to 
assure the quality of the teaching by keeping in its own hands the 
certification of teachers while in our excellent sister state to the 
East that has been left to the same local authority which employed 
the teachers. After doing as much as that, and it has been very 
much, our state has left all the rest, including the secondary schools, 
to community initiative and local pride. We have stirred local 
initiative by favoring legislation, and we have done what reasonably 
might be done through the liberal distribution of state moneys to 
give education in every town and hamlet in the state the advantages 
which the stronger and wealthier communities owed to it. We have 
compelled in nothing save that there shall be a suitable building 
and a qualified teacher for a common elementary school. To that 
extent, we expect to maintain a compulsion which compels. Beyond 
that we encourage and aid and then give to every community the 
satisfaction which must flow from its own accomplishments. 

Our plan has prevailed from the beginning of our educational 
history and it prevails nearly everywhere in the country. Under 
it we have as excellent schools, both primary and secondary, as we 
would have had under a more mandatory system of legislation, 
while we have an educational system which is altogether unique 
in its flexibility and adaptiveness to all local conditions as well as 
in the stimulus which gives to the intellectual self-activity of a 
community and to willing popular support because of free popular 
proprietorship. 

Now and again it has been proposed that we shall adopt some 
compulsory policies which will assure the universality of the second- 
ary schools. Any step in that direction would be necessarily disturb- 
ing in the affairs of a system now grown great and in my judgment 
would remove from it its finest flavor and the features which make 
for its best efficiency. It should not be done unless necessary, and 
the necessity is not apparent. A secondary school is not necessary 
to safe citizenship. It may or it may not be necessary to the child's 
best chance in the world. That depends upon conditions. I can 
conceive of conditions in which compulsory attendance upon a 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 8 1 

secondary school might be what I would think an interference with 
the right of the parent and the best interest of the child. Whether 
or not that is conclusive of the question as one of policy it is con- 
clusive of it as one of principle. Going on just as we are we shall 
have secondary schools quite as universal as they can be useful^ 
and wherever they are they will stir the pride and hold the affections 
of a people. 

New York recently began in paying from the state treasury $20 
per year for the tuition of each nonresident pupil attending an 
established high school, a policy which proves her intelligent interest 
in a great subject and may easily be the instrument of very great 
results. But it seems to me that this movement needs some guidance 
to the end that it may do the most good, indeed that it may do more 
good than harm. Very possibly the legislation has not yet reached 
its final form and it needs generous and unselfish treatment to the 
end that its enduring state may be free from danger and full of good. 
I am confident you will agree with me in these propositions. 

i The point of this legislation is not to aid established high 
schools. That is done otherwise and very amply. If not sufficiently 
the remedy is upon application alleging the fact and by legislation 
which avows the purpose. 

2 The state has not intended to change its thoroughly established 
policy of only encouraging secondary instruction. It has not begun 
the policy of wholly providing sucn instruction without cost to pupils 
in districts without high schools. If it had, the logical result would 
be absolute state support of all high schools, which would be mis- 
taken if not absurd. 

3 The point of this movement is to aid deserving pupils in 
nonhigh school districts, through equalizing to them the advantages 
which state appropriations now give to pupils in high school districts. 

4 The state must not make it to the interest of a district without 
a high school to refrain from establishing one. It must not set up 
a policy which would develop great secondary schools, really small 
colleges, at central points by taking away the strength of existing 
schools in smaller places or at the cost of preventing additional 
schools. 

5 The state ought not to put upon existing schools the burden 
of instructing nonresident pupils at much less than actual cost and 
ought not to encourage boards and principals to do this, in the inter- 
est of the mere largeness or prominence of schools. 

6 The movement should have in mind, not one interest as against 



&2 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

another, but every educational interest of the state. It must aid 
the weaker district and the specially deserving youth. The new 
stream of financial support must be made to help the interests of 
secondary education not where it needs no help, but where it really 
needs help, and most where it needs most help, and particularly to 
help boys and girls who will not get help without it. And it must 
be done so that the particular help afforded will not injure general 
or continuing interests. 

Without any wholly confident judgment as to next steps in this 
connection, the foregoing propositions seem sound and it is not 
certain that the existing legislation exactly squares with them. But 
time and discussion will point the way for us. We have never yet 
been unable to put an appropriation where it would do the most 
good and we are not likely to be derelict now. 

The secondary schools and the certification of teachers 

The recent determination to accept the standings gained in the 
secondary schools for admission to the teaching profession affords 
an added reason, if any were needed, for universal interest in these 
schools, for giving the best attention to their affairs and for stand- 
ardizing their work with the closest exactness. The fact illustrates, 
if it does not measure, the advantages of the educational unification 
movement in the state. 

Secondary schools and district schools under same supervision 

Let me add that I have been giving considerable thought to the 
interests of the country schools and I am impressed with the belief, 
which I have heretofore expressed to the State Association of 
School Commissioners, that those schools would be much benefited 
if they and the union schools and the town secondary schools could 
be actually related to each other in the same supervisory district. 
A like advantage would accrue to the higher schools. 

I am not unaware that under the law they are commonly in the 
same supervisory district now. But it is more a legal fiction than 
an actual fact. The manner in which school commissioners are 
chosen and the entire absence of statutory requirements or accepted 
understanding as to qualifications, results in the election of many 
commissioners who have aptness for public affairs but who can not 
be actually accepted as superintendents of the technical affairs of 
the larger and higher schools. To say that this is always so would 
of course be unjust but that it is widely so will not be denied. I 
shall be wholly within the limits of truth if I go farther and add 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 83, 

that in many a whole county taken together there is no actual 
supervision of the rural schools and we all know well enough that 
schools are not likely to get on as well without it as with it. 

The fact that it would be impossible of success if there were not 
an even stronger reason, as there is, is enough to make any move- 
ment to abolish the district system uninviting. It is hardly worth 
while to entertain ourselves with things that cannot be done or 
ought not to be done. But a movement to relate the secondary 
schools with the elementary schools in a unit of supervision which is 
small enough to make supervision possible, and under a superin- 
tendent who can superintend the largest and the highest as well as 
the smallest and the weakest to their advantage is possible of attain- 
ment and would be beneficent in its consequences. 

Kindly give this matter the benefit of your reflections as it may 
quite possibly be a subject of future discussion. 

Training teachers for secondary schools 

The unprecedented growth of our secondary schools has created 
a demand for teachers of advanced work which it has been difficult 
to meet. The graduations from college are more than ever before 
but high schools want a large proportion of men teachers and the 
number of thoroughly prepared men who want to teach is small. 
Boys who have been taught by women all through the elementary 
grades must at least hear a masculine voice and get things from a 
man's point of view by the time they get into the high school. 

But the difficulty is rather deeper than that not many men incline 
to teaching. The work of the colleges does not incline them. Other 
callings seem more inviting and the colleges do but little by way of 
corrective. The colleges do not take much stock in educational 
theory about the professional training of teachers. College manage- 
ments are more worldly wise than they used to be. So they nod to 
this theory in a polite way rather than lose any practical advantage 
which might result from ignoring it. But such interest as most of 
them take in it comes from prudence rather than conviction. And it 
must be admitted that when a university does establish a separate 
department upon the theory that education is a science and teaching 
a profession, unless it makes a separate school with considerable 
autonomy of its own, it finds difficulty in securing professors who can 
justify the theory and stir the efforts of ambitious men students. 
Yet, you and I know that one can hardly hope to become a successful 
teacher without deep study of educational history, theory and practice. 

But if one can not teach without knowing: how to teach he surelv 



.84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

can not teach without knowing the subject he is to teach. The 
courses in the state normal schools (excepting the State Normal 
College) are not broad enough in subject-matter to prepare for 
teaching in the secondary schools and it seems to me can not be 
made so without an unwarrantable expense and the probability of 
lessening the attendance and withdrawing their direct and impera- 
tive aid to the elementary schools. 

Now I have no doubt about the need of college bred men and 
women, with a good proportion of men, who have been prepared 
to teach, for the work of the secondary schools. We are not getting 
a sufficient supply. There is an hiatus in the educational system. 
The academies have rather the better of this because of their inde- 
pendent self-control, because of their somewhat greater exclusiveness, 
and because of their closer college connections. The high schools are 
suffering. It is time to do something; and the something might 
as well be decisive. Why not set a date when no teacher without 
an approved college degree shall be newly appointed in any second- 
ary school while the school shares in state appropriations ? 

This would help the high schools most decisively. And it would 
do much more. It would help the colleges to a really serious appre- 
ciation of their responsibility for the plane of work in the secondary 
schools ; and it would accentuate and vitalize the college influence 
in the educational system and in all the intellectual life of the state. 

This state has been splendidly aggressive in uplifting the learned 
professions. It is no reflection upon any other work of recent years 
in the Regents office to say that the best things done have been 
the development of additional secondary schools and the closing of 
the doors to the learned professions against persons who are not 
learned. Not one whit of anything accomplished is to be lost. All 
we have gained we are to hold and more. There is to be no slacking 
of the pace. But let us be specific. In view of the high ground 
gained for all of the other professions it ought not to be difficult to 
do as much for the teaching profession. It is an absurdity to protect 
the other professions and neglect the most important teaching posi- 
tions. The truth is we are, relatively speaking, protecting against 
incompetency in the elementary schools, even the little ones at the 
cross-roads, more than in the highest and largest schools we have, if I 
except certain cities where special or local laws apply. 

The educational system must balance. The work in the upper 
schools is the hope of all the schools below them. There must be 
universal recognition of the worth of scholarship— not merely of 
its form or its pretensions, but of its juices and its flavor, and of 



THE NEW YORK SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEM 85 

its power to apply itself to the real concerns of life. Where shall 
this be if not in the schools? surely where, if not in the policies of 
an ambitious state system of education? 

It will be unfair to accept this as a general imputation against the 
teachers of our middle schools. They have met the demands of their 
day. They have carried us over a transition period in the evolu- 
tion of a great system. They are in most cases better prepared to 
serve us still than other or younger teachers can be. No criticism 
upon them and nothing but compliment for them is intended. They 
brought all that they could get into their work and it was much. 
They have supplemented it with experience and study. Nothing 
more could be asked of them. Nothing shall be done which could 
reflect upon them now. But we are facing new conditions and a 
new outlook. We must provide for an opening era. And we must 
make that era as great as we can through the sagacity of our plans 
and the abundance and forehandedness of our provision for it. 

Conclusion 

I must thank you for your patience, as I do very warmly, and 
speak my concluding word. The educational territory between the 
elementary schools and the colleges has come to be well occupied and 
it will be as completely occupied as it is possible for occupancy 
to serve the ends of a free people. This educational territory is 
historic, — as engaging as the middle ground which stretches through 
the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk is enticing in the fasci- 
nating story of the Revolution. Upon this ground educational ex- 
clusiveness has met the democratic intellectual advance and been 
overwhelmed by it. Private schools will continue to command en- 
dowments of money and zeal and faith, and probably more liberal 
ones than heretofore; they will continue to serve constitutents who 
prefer some educational exclusiveness and they shall have our fellow- 
ship and support in the doing of it. But by far the greater number, 
and all supported by taxation, will train for life as well as for 
college, will express the purposes of the multitude, and be alined 
with the peoples' system of common schools. Upon that point the 
summing up is finished and the verdict is in. So far as conditions 
give rise to the demand the doors of the secondary schools will have 
to swing free to all the children of the state. The common schools 
are going higher. A universal system of free education is coalesc- 
ing. The spectacle is inspiring. The readjustments may take time 
but when realized they will be potential because voluntary, energizing 
and uplifting because the natural product of a free people's thinking. 



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